That's not how it works at all. If contact tracing was perfect, you could stop the virus before infecting more than a handful of people, and then poof it would disappear.
Just because it can technically spread to everyone doesn't mean it will. It's just one more factor.
No, that actually is how it works. The Ro value is on average how many people the virus will infect within a population. Unless a population was completely isolated, then the Ro value is not relevant. But that's not true. Ebola's Ro value was significantly less than coronavirus primarily because it was spread through surface touching, not through the air. The transmission is what matters here. And I also was not making a point that contact tracing was perfect, but it helps when your population is isolated over a small geographical area and is small on absolute terms. The bigger the population, the exponential growth of potential contacts.
Japan's population is not small. It's about half of the population of the US. (About 40% if you're being pedantic, even 38% if you're being anal)
Japan is also spread through islands and has some very dense areas. Contact tracing isn't going to be any harder in the US.
Contact tracing becomes a little harder when you don't handle the crisis in a timely fashion. It'd be even easier in the US as you can just limit travel from the infected states and you have tons of land separation.
Contact tracing becomes exponentially more difficult when the population increases. If you have an island of 100 people, That is 100 individual points of transmission in which any one person can have contact with. When you have an island of 1,000 people, that's 1,000 individual points of transmission in which the virus can spread. The more the population, the harder it becomes to contact trace because of the potential number of contacts. To your point, contact tracing only works when the virus is under control. But even then, geography also plays a role. The U.S. is a lot larger than Japan so health officials need to work over a greater area instead of isolating resources into one condensed area.
Another point to make, Japan has greater social conformity than the U.S. You tell an American to do something simple like washing their hands and wear a mask, they'll do the opposite. Japanese people will conform for the betterment of society and don't mind sacrificing personal comfort for it. This isn't a necessarily a failure on Trump. Americans can be retarded, at times.
Just because New York got hit, it didn't mean that florida had to be hit hard, but it did. Florida is Trumptopia and they listened to big daddy Trump. I'm not saying Trump is bad, nor that Trump people are bad, many of my friends are very pro-Trump.
What I am saying, is that Trump fucked up. Do you disagree?
Florida didn't really get hit that hard though. And define "Trump fucked up"? Whenever governors asked for federal resources, Trump delivered. When Cuomo asked for PPE, he got it. When he asked for ventilators, he got it. People don't understand that the response to coronavirus is largely up to the state level because the federal government can't be the ones to lock everyone in a cage in order to prevent the spread. States can implement lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, introducing testing infrastructure, prepping their hospitals, ect. That isn't Trump's responsibility. What is his responsibility is failing to step in when states request for help, and so far I have not seen that.
Also important to note, it's mostly doctors running the show. Despite what people like to think, Trump isn't the one making calls. His staff his. So rest assured that it's professionals that are handling this.
Also on the China data. Thunderf00t on YouTube (thunderf00t is a PHD chemist, who does mostly nuclear chemistry experiments on nuclear reactors and has had a pretty solid academic career (a lot of impactful papers)) used the data from China.
In fact using the data from China he made a simple but actually very accurate model for other countries, including the US before the whole thing was even a crisis. Since his model was accurate, that leads me to believe the Chinese numbers were accurate.
You'll notice on the chinese data there is suddenly a day with a huge increase, that's when they expanded the definition for what is considered coronavirus related.
Yes the Chinese government is pretty close to dystopian. I would never want to live in country like that. However look at the PPE they are using and the measures they took. It makes pefect sense they could contain the virus quickly.
It doesn't matter if Thunderf00t used their data or not. A lot of high level intellectuals used China's data thinking it was accurate and it simply is not. Again, I'll reference China's curve. Not a single country in the ENTIRE world has a logarithmic curve in terms of cases. It's not possible. China began shipping out journalists from their country when coronavirus got out of hand and silenced doctors. Don't take their word for shit, including their reported cases.
