How Europe sleepwalked into the coronavirus crisis | Hacker News Reader

How Europe sleepwalked into the coronavirus crisis

reuters.com

29 pointschewz72 comments

There is a huge difference countries in between in Europe. On one hand, you have Spain/Italy and on another, you have Denmark which is starting to plan a controlled opening in the coming weeks [1]. Denmark being the second European country to impose lockdown after Italy. But did so much earlier in the curve than Italy.

Going forward it will be very interesting to compare the 3 Scandinavian countries Denmark/Norway and Sweden. Very similar countries cultural, political, and economical but have chosen two very different paths. With Sweden being the last European country holding out against lockdown.

Edit: While the countries have very different population/area ratio their capitals Copenhagen/Oslo/Stockholm are comparable. And I'm not only talking about the actual number of cases/deaths. But also how the economy is going to be effected in the long run.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-denmar...

When comparing responses of each nation we really out to give consideration to the population of each as well as the land area.

When one nation has less population that a large city in another there really is no good comparison.

It might also be the case the the Italy (the north in particular) suffered from a larger influx of people with the virus from China or elsewhere to begin with. This means that they're starting with a significant handicap. I think this also adds to the difficulties of direct comparisons between countries.

> But did so much earlier in the curve than Italy.

Things could have been better for Italy if they had imposed a total lockdown a little earlier for the Bergamo industrial region. The fact is that the industrialists in that area were against it and nothing happened, apart from the whole region of Lombardy being put in a looser lockdown a few days after things had started going bad in the Bergamo region. That "helped" the virus spread around Bergamo and in the whole province of Lombardy, so that Bergamo together with neighbouring Brescia were the most heavily hit regions both in number of cases and deaths.

Denmark had it "easier", so to speak, because if you lockdown Copenhagen I guess you've already lockdown-ed half of the country already.

This is an article in Italian [1] about what went wrong in the Bergamo industrial region.

[1] https://www.ilpost.it/2020/04/01/disastro-alzano-lombardo-ne...

As the other comment already said you're comparing apples and oranges. If you take some regions of Spain that has around the same population of Denmark for example they're more or less at the same level of Denmark. Most of the contagions in Spain are in Madrid.

Germany also does better than Italy and Spain and it has a bigger population.

Germany started later, wait a few weeks and we will talk then. Spain was pretty good too when Italy was already in the hundreds of deaths.

England is looking far better than Spain and Italy NOW, but I will bet that the contagions and deaths are going to be higher ( proportionally speaking ) in a couple of months.

The infections in Germany were the same as Italy after the same period.

Italy is getting better now but it was already a hard hit when being at the same level as Germany is now.

If the numbers are right, things are already at its worst in Germany while still being much better than Italy at its worst.

I keep hearing from friends in Germany that the death numbers reported are completely bollocks. They say the people who die with pre-existing conditions aggravated with the coronavirus are not counted, nor the people who are not tested after deceasing. Whereas in Italy seems everything that dies in the medical system these days is being counted.

Would love to see someone confirming or disproving this...

I read this the other way around.

The death numbers from Italy were completly insane, because they counted in people who would have died anyway and just happened to be infected by the virus at the time of death.

Don't know which is true.

Both countries are counting all infected.

https://swprs.org/rki-relativiert-corona-todesfaelle/

The President of the German Robert Koch Institute confirmed on March 20, 2020 that test-positive deceased are counted as "corona deaths" regardless of the real cause of death: "We consider a corona death to be someone who has been diagnosed with a coronavirus infection was, «said the RKI President when asked a journalist (see video below).

According to experts, the number of deaths is severely relativized, since the patients die in many cases from their previous illnesses and not from the virus. Data from Italy show that over 99% of the deceased had one or more chronic medical conditions, including cancer and heart problems, and only 12% mentioned the coronavirus on the death certificate as a cofactor.

A look at the statistics of the German test-positive deaths shows that the median age of the deceased, similar to Italy, is over 80 years and that there were usually one or more serious previous illnesses.

But there's only so much you can do to hide an influx of dead bodies; whatever the explanations are, people would notice at least this.

It's like the numbers in China. Who the fu--- believes that a country with 1.4 billion people and that had no previous knowledge of the virus ( like the rest of the countries ) has less contagions and deaths than USA, EU or any other country.

Yes, I don't really know what's true.

I can just have assumptions on what is reported.

To me it seems that the US is spiraling out of control, Italy and Spain had shitty health systems so they didn't do well and Germany doing okay.

But yeah, could be totally wrong reporting.

Yeah, the worst by far...

I don't know where are you taking your data from but it seems a bit skewered.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-healthcare-...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUizkvaWsAAiENg?format=jpg&name=...

I'm talking about the shitty health systems

To anyone interested, these are the latest official numbers from Spain https://covid19.isciii.es/

The absolute population should only start to play a role once a significant part of the population is or has been infected. In all other cases the population density should be the only invariant factor that matters for the different infection rates.

Denmark has 18 deads per 1M people, on the european situation I would it's on the average. Infections started much earlier in Italy and Spain, most of the other countries had the advantage of learning from these 2 and having the time to prepare.

If you look at death per capita situation in Nethetlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland and recently also in Sweden and UK is on par with France..

BE 87 per milion, NL 68, France 62, Switzerland 58, Luxemburg 46, UK 35, Sweden 24.

also Andora and San Marino, Monaco

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

"While the countries have very different population/area ratio their capitals Copenhagen/Oslo/Stockholm are comparable."

I would say not even close....

Population:

Oslo .. 673,469 -- Barcelona .. 5.515 million -- Madrid 6.55 million --

Population density:

Oslo .. 3,500 people per square kilometer -- Barcelona .. 16,000 people per square kilometer -- Madrid .. 5,400 people per square kilometer -- `

How did you get from Copenhagen/Oslo/Stockholm to Oslo/Barcelona/Marid?

Copenhagen : 602,481 Stockholm : 974,073

Still no comparable, but whatever, it seems you got your own opinion.

So, the short story here would be: EU proposed to help & coordinate action but individual governments failed to acknowledge/assess how unprepared they were (going to be), as they did not assess the threat properly. And their joint reports provided a false sense of security to the whole.

That there's a deep coordination/collaboration failure here is clear.

But how could several many governments/states all assess that much wrongly on their own capacity to face the epidemics?

The root cause failure was not complacency about medical supplies.

The root cause failure was complacency about the contagiousness and mortality rate and the failure to contain Covid-19 to China by stopping all international travel.

Containment at the source should have started at least in early December 2019 to be effective. And even then, that would likely not have been effective (because the severity of the epidemic was not asserted widely & seriously enough by then).

So the issue is realistically not there.

China did its best to keep the epidemic secret for at least several weeks, while buying medical supplies from Europe and other areas, draining them of their own reserves.

Sure, peddle a conspiracy rather than incompetence in the face of a new outbreak that when it started nobody knew how serious it was going to be.

It was both malice on the part of Chinese and incompetence of Europeans. But the punchline is the contrast between the hyper-competent, serious image of US healthcare in the movie Contagion and how it turned out in practice.

Surprisingly former Eastern Bloc countries are doing quite well thanks to early lockdowns. I think it's largely due to people not trusting public health systems.

What I would like to know: Given the huge number of infected health workers, are ffp2/ffp3 masks with valve still commonly used in hospitals?

I think you mean: In institutions where health care workers work, which is much more than hospitals. Many of them work in practices or in various kinds of nursing homes. The masks you may see often in an ICU aren't ones you'll see often in a nursing home or a physiotherapist practice.

I think specifically in Spain, there were a particularly high infection rate of frontline hospital staff.

Spain like the majority of European countries does not have issues like lack of staff training or not following state-of-the-art protocols. So it begs the question, are the infection control protocols that we currently have, safe enough to deal with this virus?

An interesting case-study is Cotugno Hospital, an infectious disease hospital in Naples, Italy. It has so far reported zero staff infections. Perhaps their 'over-the-top' protocol is what is required for all Hospitals when dealing with SARS-COV2?

This virus is a strange one. Apparently there's no single symptom that affects even a small majority of the infected patients. That's a strange, unusual problem to handle for a system that assumes that illnesses make people ill.

A hospital is self-selecting, in that it doesn't have 50% patients that feel well and show no symptoms. The people who work at a hospital take the precautions that are considered appropriate for the disease they've diagnosed. This means that to some degree, they're not ambushed by asymptomatic infected people.

What I actually mean is if the standard protocol currently used in hospitals sees the health care workers as potential source of infections or only as potential infection targets.

There are routine protocols to keep health care workers from infecting patients. This is common, because the problem is a very common one. The stuff that lives on a healthy nurses's hands may do no damage there, but would do terrible damage if it could invade a patient who's weak from yesterday's operation. The same applies to the common cold, to whatever the nurse may have picked up while treating another patient half an hour ago, and many, many other varieties of the same hygiene problem.

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