RJM posted:I saw an article on nature.com (Nature Magazine) had the Chinese been honest and up front about what was going on from the beginning the outbreak would have likely been about 10% of what it became.
Nature.com has a reputation of being unbiased and scientifically accurate.
That the Chinese being more upfront about it would have made a difference in its initial transmission outside of China wouldn't surprise me at all.
Thing is, the world should basically already know that would be true about a pandemic starting in China (see SARS and MERS before), and should probably be assuming anything coming out of China in this regard is much worse, potentially, than what they're claiming initially.
Which means that the US and Europe should have been far more aggressive in dealing with the spread as soon as the first cases popped up. SK appears to have cracked down almost immediately on containment, and one patient getting outside of that initial containment effort is what got them as deep as they are.
Never mind the various supply chain issues with masks and ventilators and similar resources in the US, which we should probably be addressing for the future now, not getting much more aggressive about epidemiological control in the early days is going to end up being the key detail when this eventually all gets analyzed in hindsight. It's probably going to end up having been an order of magnitude or two level difference (that is, the difference between a few hundred or thousand deaths in the US and tens or hundreds of thousands).