Philosophical debate du jour: Can the virus be contained or only delayed?

Now very clear that the UK response to Coronavirus isn’t just a delayed one compared to many other Western democracies - it’s a fundamentally different one. Those countries are taking drastic action to try to contain the virus now. UK govt has decided that’s now impossible.

— Benjamin Kentish (@BenKentish) March 12, 2020

This tweet by the LBC political correspondent seems accurate. 

Can the virus be contained? It is notable that the numbers of infections in Wuhan in China do seem to be falling. I do not necessarily trust Chinese figures but they show that new cases of coronavirus have dropped to single digits for the first time since China began reporting daily numbers in mid-January. 

Bloomberg reports:

As of March 12, China has eight new cases and seven additional deaths, said the National Health Commission on Friday. The dramatic plunge to a single-digit increase -- from the height of nearly 15,000 cases added in one day on Feb. 13 -- is another sign that viral outbreak has come under control at its epicenter for now, despite accelerating its spread in Europe and the U.S.

General Secretary Xi recently visited Wuhan, which suggests the virus is under control there. Presumably this is because of the severe quarantine, cutting off the entire province of Hubei from the outside world, or is it?

Russia has very few cases of the virus, after closing her border with China early on. I am not sure if closing the border with China explains it. South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong are also seeing much lower infection rates than in Italy. What is the explanation? 

Is the virus going to be around for many years like Aids? Possibly. Will it infect half the world's population killing between 0.5% and 1% of them? Nobody has any idea.

But Ross Clark writing in the Spectator is more cheerful and asks if the virus will slow its rapid progress now that the warm weather is here, just as flu does.

There is a good reason to wonder whether there is a natural element to the decline of Covid-19 in China. We know that other viral illnesses such as flu tend to fall back when spring arrives, with viruses less able to survive outside the human body as the temperature rises. Hubei province, the seat of the disease, is in the centre of the country where spring arrives a little ahead of when it does in Britain. Daytime temperatures in recent days have been around 14 degrees celsius, several degrees higher than in Britain or in Lombardy, where the Italian outbreak is concentrated. It is nine degrees in Milan this afternoon and 11 degrees in Venice, falling to six degree celsius in Bolzano. It might be that coronavirus is simply responding to ordinary seasonal decline.


Either way, the Chinese experience is in sharp contrast to the panic being witnessed around the rest of the world. We are still being fed worst-case scenarios where 80 per cent of Britons catch the disease and 100,000 of us die from it. There is nothing in the Chinese experience to suggest this is remotely likely. In Hubei, only 20 per cent of the population caught the disease – and for the moment it seems unlikely that the total Chinese death toll will rise a lot further beyond the 3,100 who have so far succumbed. The question is, though, how much of the decline in China is due to drastic containment measures and how much is due to the natural limitations of this virus?