In China the cure was certainly way worse than the disease, though they could not have foreseen that at the time.

They stopped their death toll at under 5,000 and have had no new domestic infections in weeks.

We are going to have two hundred thousand deaths or more, or way more.

And we have already had way more infections than they and the count is still rising.

This is what China did to beat coronavirus. Experts say America couldn't handle it

Nobody else in the world has been as draconian as China, and few (not none) in the modern world have been less so than we.

Lots of people are attributing the differences in approach both to cultural differences and a glaring, extreme difference regarding the power of the state.

But the Chinese committed to their all-in approach, accepting massive damage to their economy and resulting collateral damage to public health and even eventual life expectancy, etc., when it was not yet known that the new virus would not turn out to have a fatality rate of more than 30, 40, or even 50%.

The rate for Ebola was in fact about 50%.

That of SARS was about 15%.

That of MERS was 35 + %.

So what the hell else could the Chinese have done?

And the Europeans, too, had to make their choices weeks earlier than we did and in a greater state of uncertainty about the lethality of the bug.

But by the time SARS-Cov-2 (the Coronavirus we're dealing with now) got off to a start here the world knew the fatality rate of the disease would be less than 5%.

Would the Chinese have gone as far as they did if they had known that when it was time to choose?

Pshaw.

But maybe next time it will be a virus as infectious as this one but also as deadly as Ebola.

The world is absolutely not prepared to deal with anything like that, and we need to be prepared.

Or the entire population of the world could drop by 30 to 50%, and just imagine the economic, cultural, and political effects that would have.