Denmarks shuts down all schools, daycare facilities, universities, highschools
thelocal.dk
thelocal.dk
On top of this all public gatherings of more than 100 people is discouraged, and it is alsp encouraged for all bars and nightclubs to keep closed for now. These are expected to be signed into law within the week.
The government is aware that this is a dificult situation financially for a lot of companies and are working to resolve it. A lot of it will be through delayed payment of taxes and VAT to keep cashflow.
That makes weathering a storm like this relatively easy from an economics standpoint. It's easy to delay revenue and cover fixed costs without incurring any significant financing costs.
The economy isn't a GDP or stock market index; it is a complicated process for getting people what they want and need based on an estimate of how much we can afford to give them. It can't weather everyone parking up in any meaningful sense no matter what numbers are published in the ledgers.
A low interest rate is the direct result of indifference to inter-temporal substitution. It indicates that households are willing to shift consumption from the present to the future, that firms can readily defer capital investments, and that foreign producers are willing to cover temporary shortfalls in domestic production because they have high faith in the currency and financial system.
All of those things are physical manifestations of how and why it would be easy for Denmark to weather a temporary supply shock. 3-6 months of reduced economic output can easily be handled by relatively painless deferrals in demand. Danish consumers will shift back vacations, home upgrades and new cars until later in the year. Danish businesses have very well maintained capital equipment, and can stretch maintenance and upgrade cycles. Chinese and Russian exporters have very high faith in the Danish Krona, and will sell goods today for the promise of Danish goods in the distant future.
I'm no expert in Danish monetary policies; but I'm 80% confident their interest rates are set by these people:
https://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/marketinfo/official_interes...
It isn't an emergent phenomenon if a 25 person committee declares what the phenomenon will emerge to.
> A low interest rate is the direct result of indifference to inter-temporal substitution.
It is a direct response to government removing anyone who cares about the future from the market by buying them out.
> Chinese and Russian exporters have very high faith in the Danish Krona, and will sell goods today for the promise of Danish goods in the distant future.
I mean sure, but Denmark is maintaining a currency peg. None of this is reassuring free market singalling; this is all the largely the government declaring that the numbers must not look bad.
Note that I’m not criticizing the solution, just remarking on how hard the problem looks.
This will hit smaller companies hard; particular service sector such as hair dressers, restaurants, contractors etc.
I suppose its ok early on, but seems problematic if enough people eventually get infected.
Understood that schools are primary transmission vectors.
The world is in crisis. Arguing against public attempts to contain a virus based on "Something that I heard" is more than a little irresponsible right now. Surely the point is valid as a debate subject, but it needs numbers and it needs analysis. Prima facie, social isolation works, and at this stage is our only remaining hope at containment.
That said, its really not uncommon for other family members besides grandparents and even friends of the family to take care of your children in Denmark.
[1]: (In Danish) https://www.dsb.dk/find-produkter-og-services/dsb-borneguide...
My partner works as an RN, and I'm in software development. I've always taken the days off when our child is ill, it's logistically simpler, but I make 2X the salary so we have always said my job is the priority if we lose child care long term.
If our daycare closes for a long period that means my partner needs to stop going to work and there's one less RN at that hospital.
To make things worse, our daycare has already stated that the current "24 hours fever free" policy of your child returning is now "14 days fever free, or a physician's note indicating it's safe to return" -- and you must keep paying while they are out, that's the existing policy when it's a day or so and apparently will continue even when it's two+ weeks... no relief expected.
If daycares are forced to shutdown, but still require payment from parents, that will be absolutely egregious and infuriating.
source: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
China, on the other hand, did not do this, and they were forced to shut down schools for 6 months.
These moves are HARD and painful, but the key to stopping a pandemic is acting overly aggressive and far-reaching. The USA is not doing nearly enough. We're going to be Italy in about 2 weeks.
two weeks is when you will start entering really bad phase, not returning to normal. I am guessing ~100 dead in Denmark by April.
https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237781162153717760
or
https://twitter.com/illandancient/status/1237857213621907456
no such thing
>China, on the other hand, did not do this, and they were forced to shut down schools for 6 months.
where did you get that 6 months number from? considering Virus started in January and its March now.
>These moves are HARD and painful, but the key to stopping a pandemic is acting overly aggressive and far-reaching.
there is nothing aggressive or far-reaching in those moves, Poland enacted similar measures yesterday and every expert agrees its not enough and too late.
1. Healthcare system is the TOP priority and keeps its resource adequate is critical.
2. If workers need to take care of their children, try to seek more ways to staff the hospital: (1) recruiting volunteers for non-specialized roles (2) adjusting shifts (3) concentrate resources, even move resources geographically.
Basically this is what China has done to bend the curve and what Italy is currently doing. You have to think this as a whole.
Denmark however has a completely different structure socially. All private sector employees who can work from home are urged to work from home. All public sector employees who are not working in any matter-of-life-and-death function are forced to stay at home. The public sector employees will still get paid despite not working. Practically this means very, very few cases of health care workers with children needs to be home supervising the children.
Are they? There seems to be limited transmission from children (to other children or even adults), in part because they generally aren't getting symptomatic when exposed.
via https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...:
. "For COVID-19 virus, initial data indicates that children are less affected than adults and that clinical attack rates in the 0-19 age group are low. Further preliminary data from household transmission studies in China suggest that children are infected from adults, rather than vice versa."
I don't deny kids can transmit it to other kids, just that the odds are low. In fact, the only school I could find that was a cluster (Suyeong-gu Kindergarten in Korea) was 5 infected adults, 1 infected kid, and 160 negatives (which I assume were dominated by children).
Does anyone know of school clusters that have emerged?
I wonder what basically a 2-4 week vacation for an entire nation looks like.
I really doubt it is as effective as many think unless there is a general lock down and people are expected not to visit other people.
She admitted that the specifics of such solutions are not known at this time.
The consensus over there is that the disruptions would be worse than an increase in infections. Closing schools and other limits would only delay the infections and they would likely become unmanageable when limits are lifted. The emphasis is on protecting those that are most likely to get seriously sick, and not limiting the number of infections of those that are not at (high) risk. They also consider that if those that have been infected build immunity, it would be better (and I'm paraphrasing) "to just get it over with."
On Friday they will start testing around the country to get a better understanding of the infection rate, especially whether it's already prevalent in the community. This will be on an unprecedented scale, as they expect to test >2% of the population. The expected result is that the infection is already widely distributed in the community.
Even if it was only 10%, should I find reassuring that 6000 people (less than 2% of the population) would have to get infected for the collapse of the healthcare infrastructure to start?
I guess that didn't age well. Still wish more people have trusted the advice from HK from our experiences with SARS and how to handle information from CCP.
Gje cultural difference between Asia and Europe regarding masks is interesting.
Proportionality of response matters and so do second and third order effects. What if all the above causes more than 5000 suicides? Did we win?
Rationally, you pretty confident that you won't die? Sure. But what behavior changes are you willing to tolerate not to have to take the chance? I sure wouldn't take the bet on a lark, even though the expectation is that I live.
Now think about extending that same game to your family and friends, to the school down the street, to the shopping mall, and to the elder's home in town. Some people are going to roll 0, and there's a real risk that some of those people are people you know and care about. And even if they're not, your community will still be dramatically affected. It could be your car mechanic, your office's custodial staff, or the greybeard in your office who knows how to decipher the old FORTRAN code.
I'm not willing to be flippant about that. Even 1 in 200 people can be devastating emotional, logistical, and financial toll on a community. I'm not saying panic, but I don't think it's smart or responsible to downplay the risks of infection in a disease that is currently spreading exponentially (or, at least, maintains a positive growth ratio.) Canceling gatherings, temporarily closing schools, working from home, etc.--these are all inconvenient, they make our lives and business harder, they're having a negative financial impact. But they're also totally the reasonable course of action in the face of a pretty serious threat.
Rationally, you pretty confident that you won't die? Sure. But what behavior changes are you willing to tolerate not to have to take the chance?
Evidently none, because here we are diving cars, taking painkillers and rolling coal. This is a solid read: [1]. If you're immunocompromised or old, by all means, stay inside and don't associate with groups of people. If you're young and healthy, you're totally unequivocally fine.
This quote is particularly apropos: "...We're bad at accurately assessing risk; we tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange, and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar, and common ones."
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/08/our_decreas...
And Bruce isn't discussing a failure to assess the risk of COVID-19 (the article is from 2013). He's criticizing the fetish of expect technology to solve social problems. I've interviewed Bruce and I think he'd be appalled to think his essay was being misconstrued in this manner.
And? People tend to develop immunity to diseases the've had in the past (although this is TBD in this specific case) so lifetime risk could easily be a reasonable comparison metric. My point is we do very dangerous things regularly, but because we're used to them, we largely ignore them.
Cigarettes kill 480,000 people in the US alone each year [0]. The flu kills 61,000 people in the US alone each year. Alcohol kills 88,000 people in the US alone each year. Opioids kill 77,000 people in the US alone each year.
There are 6 million car accidents in the US each year of which 2 million people receive permanent injuries and 36,000 die.
nCoV-19 is on track to kill 100 in the US.
> And your third paragraph is so full of misinformation, I almost believe you're intentionally trolling.
How so? The mortality rates are clear: under 10, 0% chance of death. 11-39, 0.2% chance of death. 40-49, 0.4% chance of death. [1] Older folks, higher rates, but of course, H1N1 kills 10% of elderly folks that get it too. And these are CFRs -- numbers which go down, sometimes dramatically, over time as we gain a fuller perspective on the situation.
If you're young you are fine. Children are basically unaffected, that is, they catch it, and it goes away. Often they don't even notice they had it.
> And Bruce isn't discussing a failure to assess the risk of COVID-19 (the article is from 2013).
I never said he was. The quote was pretty clear and free-standing: people are bad at assessing risk of unlikely or one-off events. It terrifies them.
In my opinion the essay evaluates one set of strategies people use to avoid risk at all costs: technological, but it's the realization of the underlying that is relevant here.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
I don't consider it acceptable to sacrifice 3% of the population in one fell swoop, to avoid short-term economic damage. Or even a fraction of that. It's abhorrent. Please walk me through the moral reasoning if this is your stance.
By the way, someone getting very, very sad because their quite healthy loved parent died a decade too early, is also economic damage.
You could expect Denmarks numbers to overtake Norway's before the end of today or whenever the new measurements come in.
And who knows maybe the authorities have done a good job tracking down infected people -- implying that the number of unknown cases is small.
In fact from what I understand that have been able to track most cases.
Honestly, I'm guessing this is the case because they tracked the cases from original sources and then kept following them.
Being good at tracing could also explain why the number jumped so much. Tripling in 3 days, maybe it's easy to find cases if you trace contact :D
For anyone interested in watching this unfold, I highly recommend the daily posts by /u/Fwoggie2 on /r/supplychain. Every day he posts a status update on the growth of cases per country and supply chain impacts for goods across the globe. Here's the link to today's report. https://new.reddit.com/r/supplychain/comments/fgwbrx/covid19...
Curiosity aside: hope you live long and lucky.
The scale of impact and longevity of these shutdowns could be dramatic.
Keeping kids home certainly restricts what parents can do. Some of whom may be needed to do other things.
Is there really a lot of good data to know, this will do a thing?
Nope, not in Denmark: if they're needed then they are exempt.
> Dog vil visse institutioner blive holdt åben for forældre, der ikke kan finde anden løsning, og for forældre, der varetager kritiske hverv og ikke kan finde anden løsning.
From https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/danmark-bliver-lukket-ned-...
DR is Denmark's public service radio/tv.
That doesn’t seem very drastic.
Let's see if this works. Otherwise, it's soon the Wuhan routine or the default result: write off a low single-digit portion of the population in two months. The last option would be devastating.
Switzerland and Norway are in that same boat. Spain is getting there, it's the country whose numbers are growing the fastest. France has elections on the 15th, 'nuff said.
Only Germany is comparable to that 10%, and they aren't doing anything either. They do have more ICU beds than others, but it isn't a great consolation.
How long do we continue and what criteria will be used to begin opening things back up?
How long before other parts of the economy begin to fail?
Note. They are still aiming to keep the private sector running.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/inslee-or...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/new-rochelle-coronav...
https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/fguile/germany_vs_i...
Germany lags 8 days behind Italy, Spain 7 days.
That being said, Austria is closing schools starting next week, Bavaria is discussing the same. Denmark and Plnd are closing schools as well. So even if Italy is 7 days ahead, other Eurpean countries are closing down sooner.
/r/covid19 is trying to keep all posts scientific and high quality, maybe you can monitor it over there for latest info.
I would love to get my hands on the raw data the WHO has so. Not post any results online or publicly, but to toy around with them. It is such an intriguing data set!
https://lionbridge.ai/datasets/coronavirus-datasets-from-eve...
Can't vouch for their accuracy though so be careful with any results.
Unlikely... even if they could wave a magic wand and wipe out the disease in Denmark entirely they are just going to be re-infected via people from other countries.
The mortality rate is still quite uncertain, either you believe the Chinese data (https://www.flattenthecurve.com/) or you can lean towards the South Korean data (https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=00...). The Korean data has half the mortality rate of that in China.
Bottom-line is that we are doing this to protect the elderly, so that the healthcare system won't be overrun. And in the process hopefully a vaccine or treatment will be introduced to counter the virus.