@madamswer ....."
why other approaches attract almost zero discussion/attention"
"
how do you explain the inconsistency between what the lab tests taught us, and what the official stats are telling us?"
Link to which 'lab tests' you are referring to please.
Perhaps I didn't ask the question correctly, What other approach??
There appears to be a couple of schools of thought....
1 Let it rip...
2 Go light and see what happens
3 Go hard and early
What other alternative exists?? Have I missed a post where you mention what these other approaches are?
A few governments have gone light and see what happens, then go hard later, both Italy and the UK fit into this category. China went hard and early, on the 22rd of January when the official number of cases was only 571. Even in China's case it took nearly a month until the number of new cases started to ease, and they were in the high 70ks by then, so yes a high R-0 number for that to happen.
In Australia, all the early contact tracing of people that had come in contact with infected cases from overseas, then went into isolation, probably slowed down the community spread here, reducing the R-0 greatly. It is not like we have just been letting it spread through the community.
There have been over 300k tests carried out in Australia, so we can assume they have a very large percentage of cases, but there is still some community spread, which is the real danger if there was no serious lockdown. I've already been to town this morning and everywhere I went (physio, supermarket) it was obvious that just one asymptomatic case could still easily spread this bug. The numbers still coming out of South Korea suggest this is still happening there, even though they have been on top of the situation from early on.
China, even though many don't believe their numbers, went early and very hard, they still have a lot of restrictions, yet so far they appear to be well on top of the situation compared to Europe, USA, etc who have been more reluctant to close everything.
We can only use the models we have, and this bug is re-writing all the economic rules that we thought worked. All the 'Economic modelling of a pandemic' that I've been able to come across do not deal with a situation like this, so appear to be mostly useless because of poor assumptions.
