No conspiracy theories. Ok. Deal. I'll go for it.

A lot of right wing propaganda in the US suggests the virus didn't make it to Beijing or Shanghai. That's false.

Beijing - 586 cases, 8 dead
Shanghai - 536 cases, 6 dead

The question is "how did they avoid a major outbreak?". https://twitter.com/GerryKane1/status/1246745696142835712

First things first, China is enormous - there's 1,150km between Wuhan and Beijing (890km to Shanghai). That geographical separation is an important point to note when comparing it to Ireland (Dublin to Galway 200km) or US (NY to Philly 150km).

You can't take a spin in a car.

As a basic premise, the places getting affected quickest were the ones closest to Hubei. Which makes intuitive sense, as well as being factually correct.

Hunan, Henan, Anhui and Jiangxi all roughly 500km from Wuhan have 1,000 cases and many dead.

It's not "Wuhan-only".

Still, to illustrate how quickly coronavirus spread in China:

-In 2009, it took 132 days for the H1N1 outbreak to reach 262 Chinese cities.
-In 2020, it took 28 days for covid19 to reach 262 Chinese cities.

It was spreading fast, so China reached for draconian measures, fast.

People are still not grasping the scale of what China did to try contain this.

They implemented the largest cordon of people in human history by essentially locking down Hubei, which is home to 59 million people.

They moved to protect Beijing and Shanghai at all costs.

By January 23rd, when Wuhan had 830 cases and 59 dead, China declared a national emergency. People focus on the lockdown of Wuhan but that's only part of the overall picture.

Schools closed in Beijing. Bars closed. Chinese citizens were told they must stay 6 feet apart.

They implemented sweeping measures like temperature checking, face masks basically became mandatory, you weren't allowed to try clothes on in stores, you couldn't try a wrist watch on for size etc.

You had scenes like this on their public transport system (credit-NYT):

A major conclusion of a fabulous study I read into the reduced flow of people from Wuhan is that it delayed the infection of other cities by 2.91 days on average.

*Delayed, not prevented.*

Nearly every Chinese city kept getting infected as you can see here:

A delay in infection doesn't help you at all when infection arrives - once the virus is there, you've got a serious problem.

But the extra time you can get from any delays can be used to start scaling up your hospitals, informing the public on handwashing, social distancing.

We actually followed China's TL pretty closely here in Ireland re: at what point of transmission we closed our schools, pubs etc.

You might argue China could have locked down Wuhan even earlier but generally there is such a thing as "too early", even if it's counter-intuitive.

Another argument you could make is Ireland had 36 days between the lockdown of Wuhan and our first case and therefore should have done measures like travel bans preemptively.

Italy tried it (Jan 31 travel ban). Didn't work. Rarely works.

The lockdown of Wuhan is not the sole explanation of why China avoided catastrophic outbreaks in Beijing. It's a factor but not even the biggest factor.

They avoided it by a monumental Public Health response. People washed their hands and avoided each other like the plague.

Western countries, like Ireland, France, Italy - We all essentially told our people's to wash our hands and stay apart, too.

Yet - schools close in Italy and Ireland, people were out jamming playgrounds and beaches. Pubs close they were initially out there throwing house parties

That sea-change happened once people saw the devastation rising in Italy. The early amount of misinformation from Facebook-experts and Twitter-gurus, combined with no recent history of pandemics in Ireland, meant many people weren't afraid enough to take it seriously.

Nobody in Tramore, Cobh, Malahide was afraid Leo is going to sentence them to 12-years hard labour for ignoring him.

Nobody in Paris was afraid Marcon is going to disappear them for thinking he's a clueless clown.

Chinese people might not have those luxuries of "ignoring".

They had monumental compliance in Beijing right from the jump when they became aware what was happening in Hubei.

Part based in fear, part based in civic pride.

Nobody was acting the bollox. Nobody was like "whatsapp says it's just the flu" or "sure more people die of cancer".

In practice what that means, is when someone in Beijing tested positive, they had an extremely easy contact-tracing process. They could contain clusters because they didn't have to go chasing down 20 people for every infected patient.

Ireland had to do that early on.

So that's how they contained it in Beijing. A combination of authoritarian iron fist, unprecedented restrictions on the movement of people and the high compliance of the Chinese people.

There's no secret to containing this - wash your hands and stay 6-feet away.