COVID-19 Daily Update: Failure was Not Inevitable

Yesterday we discussed regions that were initially hard hit, to determine how resistant some of those places have been to a second wave, places like New York, Spain, France, and Italy. 

Today we want to discuss regions that were not initially hard hit, where immunity levels are very low, and the virus has a lot of room to spread if it were to get out of control there. 

Excellent examples of this would include New Zealand, South Korea, and even China, where their vigorous response prevented the virus from spreading extensively beyond Wuhan. Each of these countries, in their own way, demonstrated that failure was not inevitable, and that it was possible to control (and even completely eliminate) the virus. They also demonstrate that the economic cost of COVID-19 was best minimized by first aggressively controlling the virus. 

However, recent rises in cases brought this narrative into doubt. In July/August each country saw new cases rise again. And with an almost entirely susceptible population, the fear was that it would spread out of control. 

They each handled the infection once... so the question was... could they do it again. 

The answer right now, appears to be yes. 

In all three locations, daily new cases have been falling for over a month. That means that their initial success was not a fluke, it could be repeated.

Failure was not inevitable. We failed in the USA because we chose a poor response. 

In part we failed to respond adequately because we feared the economic costs that would come with doing so. But the economic costs from our failure ended up being larger than the costs that we might have paid to succeed. 

By tomorrow, that failure will also have lead to over 200,000 dead.