The third is that Taiwan, which has done the best so far in containing the outbreak and keeping its economy working (while remaining the second most free country in Asia), has been deliberately shut out of the international community. The second is that information being supplied by the Chinese Communist Party, the government with the longest experience in dealing with the disease, is unreliable. One is that the WHO, the agency that should have led the response, has been politicized. But the confusion among public health experts is being compounded by some avoidable problems. Almost by definition for a novel virus like COVID-19, reliable data are not easy to come by. To be fair, many things affect the spread and severity of any virus: medical conditions, the weather, population densities, economic structures, political considerations, social norms and, of course, government policies. Public health experts admit that without rigorous randomized testing-which is several months away-and a safe and effective vaccine-which may be more than a year away-they cannot tell us for how long economies have to be shut down. We’ll have to wait for accurate and affordable testing to know the extent of the infection. Until we have reliable estimates of infection rates, public health professionals will not be able to tell us much about which places and people are most vulnerable to the virus, what might help to contain it, and how long the epidemic will be around. More than three months into the outbreak, we have no clue about how many people are infected.
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