Coronavirus: COVID-19

[mr.WHO]

I live in the UK; glass houses throwing stones - only difference is I think our Government has been inept in the extreme at handling this and readily acknowledge/accept and criticise them for it. I didn't at first, though they'd done ok... but as time evolved it rapidly became apparent they hadn't a clue.

I think UK tried to pull what Sweden did, but without having Sweden's:
- low population density
- low population (need less supplies to be fully stocked & prepared)
- more obedient society (I'm far from phraising Sweeden "Sheep society", but in COVID case this was useful and beneficial)
- less international traffic


In a hindsight this was obvious recipe for disaster, but initially everyone thought it's working.
This could work only for small countries.


Mid to large size countries were sucessful if they did what Poland and Germany did, basically:
- f*ck this sh*t, were locking down, lock the borders, lock the airports, lock the economy - lock everything!
- sh*t we're low on supplies...time for emergency stocking...everything is produced in China? Time for emergency production.
- We need to prepare hospitals (Poland) / Our hospitals are already tip top (Germany).
- Everyone stocked? OK. Everyone know how to wear the mask? social distance? Use the hand washing? Stay the f*ck home if you feel sick? Updated you internet bandwight? Your ISP fully stress test their grid? - All green! OK, I think we can start lifting the lockdown.
- profit (or in this case minimalize the GDP loss )

South Korea and Japan are also good examples (albeit I'm a bit concerned with rather low testing per 1M comparing to Europe).

It still to be seen, what will happen to ginormous countries like:
India (seem like COVID is booming there right now)
China (1.5 bilion people yet they only have 20+ case per day? This is really sketchy).



P.S. A bit of luck is also essential - if you got hit very early, like Italy, you will get hit hard no matter how good you are. The Italy was very big wake up alarm that scare the sh*t out of Central and Eastern Europe. This is also one thing that make me keen on pushing more funds from EU emergency budget to Italy - their sacrifice/failure saved a lot of people in rest of Europe.

[felter]

What Sweden did was a failure, even they have admitted that if they could go back in time they would do it differently. They have over 5,000 deaths, while their Neighbors with a similar sized population, who did things differently and closed down only have a death count in the low hundreds. People use them as an example because they didn't close down, but they paid the price of doing this by killing 5,000 more citizens than they would have if they had closed down. So was that a success that can be used as a good example, I don't think so.

Also can I say, I put the UK government down from the very start, saying that they were getting it wrong, that they would kill more people of this country than they needed to and that they were hiding that number, all because of the way they were going. I remember quite clearly being put down and told that I was telling lies, that I was wrong. You know nearly every single thing I said has come to be true and happened, apart from the UK death rate but that was because they changed the way they were doing things and closed the country down, 2 weeks after it should have been done. But those 2 weeks meant they killed an extra 20,000 people that didn't need to die, but did due to the incompetence of Boris Johnson. 20,000 deaths he should be held accountable for but never will. Hell he is actively still trying to get that number down, meaning he knows he did bad, while ignoring the ones that they missed, should be going up not down.

[mr.WHO]

What Sweden did was a failure, even they have admitted that if they could go back in time they would do it differently. They have over 5,000 deaths, while their Neighbors with a similar sized population, who did things differently and closed down only have a death count in the low hundreds. People use them as an example because they didn't close down, but they paid the price of doing this by killing 5,000 more citizens than they would have if they had closed down. So was that a success that can be used as a good example, I don't think so.

This is very relative failure.
5k, with overall undammaged economy.
To me it looks very impressive, comparing to 143k dead in USA and economy still in struggle.
UK has the death/infection level of Sweden, but Uk economy got hit hard and also in struggle.

IMO Sweden seems to be the best of all 3.

[Mailo]

What Sweden did was a failure, even they have admitted that if they could go back in time they would do it differently. They have over 5,000 deaths, while their Neighbors with a similar sized population, who did things differently and closed down only have a death count in the low hundreds. People use them as an example because they didn't close down, but they paid the price of doing this by killing 5,000 more citizens than they would have if they had closed down. So was that a success that can be used as a good example, I don't think so.

This is very relative failure.
5k, with overall undammaged economy.
To me it looks very impressive, comparing to 143k dead in USA and economy still in struggle.
UK has the death/infection level of Sweden, but Uk economy got hit hard and also in struggle.

IMO Sweden seems to be the best of all 3.

What you need to compare though are deaths per 1M inhabitants, not total number of deaths. And in that category, Sweden did not fare very well, especially compared to its neighbours Norway and Sweden.

Norway: 1666 cases per 1M pop, 47 deaths
Finland: 1325 cases per 1M pop, 59 deaths
Sweden: 7726 cases per 1M pop, 558 deaths (7th highest death rate out of all the countries in the world, 5th highest if you exclude countries below 100k inhabitants).

Sweden had more than 10 times the death rate compared to the two countries it is most comparable to. Very definitely not the best.

Granted, the UK has a higher death rate at 667 deaths per 1M (4th in the world, and if you exclude countries below 100k, 2nd place), and the US is closely trailing at 434, doing its very best to be great again (place 10 and 8, respectively).

[Vertigo 7]

It ultimately doesn't matter "who was the best and who was the worst". Combating this for bragging rights or finger pointing is absolutely the wrong reason to be doing so because it's always the people of these nations, big or small, that suffer the fall out. Be it the disease itself or the economic ramifications.

I honestly don't care if the US tripled the percapita death rate of any other country, so long as the country as a whole is doing the best it can to combat the thing. Clearly, that isn't happening, as other governments are similarly failing. It comes down to that one question. Is the government of your country doing the best it can to contain and control the virus? If you can honestly answer that question with 'yes', then awesome. I'll send your government a gold star sticker for doing it's job. If you can't answer with yes, then ask, why is your government, that you pay your taxes to that is in turn supposed to provide you with relative safety and security, playing games with the lives of you and your family?

[fiksal]

Brasil "safest" areas are the ones controlled by organized crime, which forces lockdown threatening to kill people wandering around with no reason.

That's gotta be ironic

[Mightysword]

To be honest I stopped looking at most statistical value these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they are meaningless or unimportant, and I understand healthcare and government personnel need them to make plans. But outside the field of expert, too often they got thrown around with the wrong context for the shake of politicizing, chest thumping and finger pointing without any meaningful solution. For me as a person, the best indicator I'm using is the state of the healthcare system. Is your area getting overrun, hospital running out of bed and corpse being put in freezer trailers? If yes then your area screw up. If not, than you're on the right track. There are too many other factors (population density, climate, daily habit, culture ...etc...) to pin it down to one or two general reason. Ultimately, the right policy is the one that is appropriate for the local.

Take Colorado as an example, statically, we're doing not that great, and we do have a slightly higher death rate. But from the beginning, there is little else you can ask for from the Colorado government.

- We're one of the first state went to lock down, even when out confirm cases was low.
- We were the first state in the US that started the drive by testing used by Korea.
- I had not seen many politicians as data driven as Governor Polis. His briefings (especially in the early day) are packed with info, including explanation of mathematical models that are used by health official. There were time he refuted CDC model data, because he went with something even more conservative. Every time we do something, it comes with a full warning that the effect will also be 2-3 weeks behind.
- And no matter how conservative Polis was, Hancock (the Denver mayor) is even more conservative than that.
- Our biggest hospitals developed their own internal testing very early, short after the lockdown.
- Two labs that make testkit based in our state.
- At no point the last few months our hospital were overwhelmed, most of the population obeyed the order and gave the authority enough time to ram up the healthcare capacity. I don't think at any point we were even half-filled.


Yet, despite all of that, statistically (without context) we're still not doing THAT great. We have low pop, but heavy concentration (the whole state have 5.8mil people, the Denver Metro area has over 3mil by itself). We are high attitude, not a great place to catch a dangerous repository decease ...etc... The point here is there is no magic bullet for this if you just want to talk about how "bad" thing is. Maybe I don't complain as often because I feel it's already so bad, saying it's bad is redundant.

[Mightysword]

Brasil "safest" areas are the ones controlled by organized crime, which forces lockdown threatening to kill people wandering around with no reason.

That's gotta be ironic

A bit off topic but time like these is when you kinda see the flaw democracy. I believe there is a saying "the best leader would be a benevolent dictator."

[fiksal]

Brasil "safest" areas are the ones controlled by organized crime, which forces lockdown threatening to kill people wandering around with no reason.

That's gotta be ironic

A bit off topic but time like these is when you kinda see the flaw democracy. I believe there is a saying "the best leader would be a benevolent dictator."

Gotta give it to dictatorships and monarchies. They are ... efficient.

[Observe]

I believe there is a saying "the best leader would be a benevolent dictator."

Here's another saying: One man's benevolence is another mans malevolence. That's always the trouble with utopia.

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

Brasil "safest" areas are the ones controlled by organized crime, which forces lockdown threatening to kill people wandering around with no reason.

That's gotta be ironic

Not quite, actually.
Apparently, cartels (or the name organized crime has down there), at the beginning of the pandemy, locked down the areas they were controlling, telling people to ask them for their needs (e.g. food or medicine), but to never, ever get out to avoid spreading the virus, which is bad for their business.
First google result:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... oronavirus
But there are more.

[Vertigo 7]

Not quite, actually.
Apparently, cartels (or the name organized crime has down there), at the beginning of the pandemy, locked down the areas they were controlling, telling people to ask them for their needs (e.g. food or medicine), but to never, ever get out to avoid spreading the virus, which is bad for their business.
First google result:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... oronavirus
But there are more.

So... what you're saying is the drug cartels are smarter than the Trump administration?

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

Not quite, actually.
Apparently, cartels (or the name organized crime has down there), at the beginning of the pandemy, locked down the areas they were controlling, telling people to ask them for their needs (e.g. food or medicine), but to never, ever get out to avoid spreading the virus, which is bad for their business.
First google result:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... oronavirus
But there are more.

So... what you're saying is the drug cartels are smarter than the Trump administration?

In the specific case, they're smarter than Bolsonaro administration.
But, well, I suppose they're also smarter than Trump's staff.

[jlehtone]

So... what you're saying is the drug cartels are smarter than the Trump administration?

Wasn't it so that federal gov. merely supports the States? The cartels obviously have much more direct contact with the citizens.
Either the "business" of a cartel differs from "MAGA business" or cartels have different "investment culture" than Trump's staff.

Is that "smarter"? On short term? On long term? Or just a lucky guess in the circumstances?

[Grim Lock]

... are you saying the U.S. is not doing worse than Europe?

No, that's what you said, not me. Or that's what you're trying to make it out to be. Again, not everything said is meant to be a competition.

No it's not coming from my "competitive" nature, to make an analogy, it's about saying a car that's not running exploding and on fire and my running and driving car both have flaws.

[Vertigo 7]

So... what you're saying is the drug cartels are smarter than the Trump administration?

Wasn't it so that federal gov. merely supports the States? The cartels obviously have much more direct contact with the citizens.
Either the "business" of a cartel differs from "MAGA business" or cartels have different "investment culture" than Trump's staff.

Is that "smarter"? On short term? On long term? Or just a lucky guess in the circumstances?

If the role of the federal government was to merely support the states, then there would be no point in voting for congress or the president and the majority of our tax dollars would go to the states instead of the federal government. Trump just wanted to keep the stock market up, and that's all he cared about so he washed his hands of the whole ordeal and told the states to figure it out. Any other president would have actually done something useful, or let those with the actual know how and expertise handle it. The feds control far more resources than any of the states do and could mobilize them if we had competent leadership.

All that aside, they said from the outset that the virus was communicable from person to person, and if you don't want people to infect each other, wouldn't the logical step be to keep people separated? If the cartels could put 2 and 2 together, why couldn't Trump?

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

So... what you're saying is the drug cartels are smarter than the Trump administration?

Wasn't it so that federal gov. merely supports the States? The cartels obviously have much more direct contact with the citizens.
Either the "business" of a cartel differs from "MAGA business" or cartels have different "investment culture" than Trump's staff.

Is that "smarter"? On short term? On long term? Or just a lucky guess in the circumstances?

If the role of the federal government was to merely support the states, then there would be no point in voting for congress or the president and the majority of our tax dollars would go to the states instead of the federal government. Trump just wanted to keep the stock market up, and that's all he cared about so he washed his hands of the whole ordeal and told the states to figure it out. Any other president would have actually done something useful, or let those with the actual know how and expertise handle it. The feds control far more resources than any of the states do and could mobilize them if we had competent leadership.

All that aside, they said from the outset that the virus was communicable from person to person, and if you don't want people to infect each other, wouldn't the logical step be to keep people separated? If the cartels could put 2 and 2 together, why couldn't Trump?

For how the stock market works, nobody in a place of power is interested in keeping it up. Instead, and Trump's behaviour makes no exception, that people wants it to fluctuate a lot, because its instability makes the right people a lot of money.
Just think at how insurance companies went up and down (by a lot) at the beginning of Trump administration, when he was attacking Obamacare, or how insurance and medical companies stocks have been bouncing in the last months. It's speculation and market disturbance at its finest.

[euclid]

Since this tread is about COVID-19, let's get back to it, shall we

Seems there are several promising vaccines in testing phase. Gives raise to hope.

Cheers Euclid

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

Since this tread is about COVID-19, let's get back to it, shall we

Seems there are several promising vaccines in testing phase. Gives raise to hope.

Cheers Euclid

Yes, sorry, we keep doing crossover episodes...

I did an ordinary checkup recently and I asked suggestions about the upcoming vaccine. Realistically, we may have a vaccine by next autumn, but due to the fact it's going to have a very short test phase, the doctor personally suggests to get a shot only if you've got serious health issues (diabetes, bad cardiopathies, ...) or if you're old, because it will 100% work against covid but they can't tell about potential side effects (to make it simple: the long testing timespan is there to nullify / mitigate side effects, not to protect from the virus).
In some countries, the goverment is likely going to strongly suggest (or possibly require) shots to elders (~65 y.o. and up) to keep intensive care branches in hospitals unburdened and ready for "standard" healthcare.

[Vertigo 7]

Well the long term side effects will be morning talk shows discussing how the vaccine causes autism with no proof whatsoever with special guest star and human hand bag, dr. Leatherface, who is neither an MD or PhD but saw Harvard on TV once when he fell asleep in his tanning bed where he gained his superpower so he's an expert in his field, and he'll likely be joined by celebrity star Mel Gibson.