Citation for the shot police officer's name?
People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly.
People seem to have chosen bad faith attack media and elected bad faith leaders. That's why the US, UK, and Brazil are doing particularly badly.
Who'd have thought that being distracted with pointless discussions about what the weather was and where a shooting did or did not happen could be detrimental to your nation's (mental) health? <shrug>
This is something we tend to assume somewhat intuitively, but I'd love to see some actual research on it.
The relationship between weakened trust in media and a societies pandemic response performance is not a trivial research question.
I wouldn't even necessarily trust the premise that overall trust declined. Could as well be perception or based on publisher selection.
... and that didn't jet include seriously operationalizing or discussing the nebulous "bad faith leaders" term or their relationship to pandemic response performance.
And Russia.
Does anyone know of any large country that managed to:
- not lockdown
- keep the disease under control
?
There are many others, but this is one of the most important.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12...
https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before...
In Japan it's not only the immunocompromised or healthcare workers who have ever donned a mask: it's nearly everybody.
You'd be hard-pressed to ride the metro and not see a handful of mask-wearers on any given Tuesday in recent years.
Whereas in countries like the United States you'd rarely see masks outside of a serious medical setting, and you wouldn't be able to buy masks for a dollar at literally every corner shop within 100 meters of your home.
https://covid.observer/de/#daily
https://covid.observer/gb/#daily
https://covid.observer/de/#per-capita
https://covid.observer/gb/#per-capita
If your primary goal was prevention of loss of life, the Swedish approach doesn't look so hot either.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-disappearing-so-fast-...
As for deaths, they have peaked in early April in England (see first spreadhseet "COVID 19 total announced deaths"):
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
https://covid.observer/gb/#daily
https://covid.observer/se/#daily
https://covid.observer/it/#daily
https://covid.observer/de/#daily
https://covid.observer/fr/#daily
https://covid.observer/es/#daily
However, from looking at the daily fatality rates, you're right that the UK might indeed be already past the peak as well.
"This file contains information on the deaths of patients who have died in hospitals in England and have tested positive for Covid-19. All deaths were reported during the period specified below and are recorded against the date of death rather than the day the deaths were announced."
It doesn't include people dying in nursing homes. It doesn't include people dying in care homes. It doesn't include people dying in supported or sheltered accommodation. It doesn't include people dying in prisons. It doesn't include people dying in their own homes.
From research we think care home deaths are a significant fraction of the total (between 30% to 50%), although we need more information.
We stopped transferring people from care homes to hospitals. We put them on palliative pathways instead of transferring them to ICUs.
It’s possible that Britain only delayed deaths by a few months, which is why they currently look better than Sweden.
This assertion grossly misrepresents the facts.
Italy and Spain were one of the first countries after China to be massively affected by covid19.
They endured a fast and entirely unexpected rise in infection rates during a period where WHO was still repeating the Chinese regime's claims that covid19 didn't spread among humans.
Still, once they started to track the disease and register hundreds of of deaths in patients infected with the disease, they acted decisively. Not only regarding quarantine and social distancing but also putting up massive field hospitals like Madrid's IFEMA hospital.
Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat. The UK, US, Brazil and Russia's government started by either pretending it did not existed, assumed they could ride the wave while doing nothing at all, or that everything would just kill off a bunch of people and vanish without any need to worry. Arguably, the government of Brazil is still in the denial stage.
That approach to an epidemic is world's apart than the approach taken by either Spain or Italy or France or Portugal or Greece or Germany or any other country in the world whose government decided to act responsibly and looking after their citizens best interests.
Do you have any evidence from that? China locked down 11 million people in Wuhan on January 23[0] which was a whole week before the first cases showed up in Italy[1].
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...
[1]: https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_gennaio_30/coronavirus-i...
The fact is, there was some some oddness between china and the WHO, be it influence, manipulated data or just the appearance of such, it is still not ignorant for the layperson to be suspicious. The problem lies where suspicions become vile forum fanfic, and others start taking it seriously.
The answer is not to point at any side, but at ourselves for promoting the division of our humanity.
By March 8th 2020 there were 366 deaths in Italy and over 7000 registered infected, according to: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
The same day the Spanish government let hundred of thousands take part in the 8th of March International Women's Day rallies all over Spain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-womens-day-spain-idUSKBN2...
According to the Reuters article there were already 589 confirmed cases in Spain at that time, 202 of them in Madrid.
Since Spain did not react earlier I don't think it is right to say the following about Spain (not referring to Italy here): "Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat".
By default, anyone can rally in Spain at any point. They don't seek authorization for the government, they have it by default. It can only be revoked and not granted. While there probably was some thought given to preventing the rallies, given what the OMS was saying at the time it looked like an over reaction. It was, of course, an error in hindsight, but I don't think it's indicative of a big failure of leadership.
Not that the other side isn't being as idiotic now, asking for raising the restrictions immediately.
But there's no excuse for March 8th. Different agencies had clearly warned what was happening and were ignored.
Edit: for fargren, what I mean encouraging:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Juy7YnqCTQ
For extrangers: it's the vice-prime minister saying on tv that all women should go to the rallies because "it's a matter of live or death" to them. Indeed.
There are many facts that have been arising later, like ministry of health forbidding doctors to attend conventions, police acquiring masks massively and several medical agencies and organizations advicing against the rallies.
It was a typical case of management discarding what every technician under them was telling them for politics.
Edit 2: please don't adopt the typical partisan position with "the opposition was also organizing rallies". No they weren't. There was one party that had its national convention around the same days. Still, it isn't comparable. The government had the direct access to the official sources of information and ignored and hid them.
This isn't a right vs. left matter. More to the left is labour minister Ribera and she was correct to inform the public of how lockdown scenarios would affect workplaces. No good deed goes unpunished, everybody attacked her from all sides... until a few days later it became obvious that what she said was unavoidable.
In the right wing, Ayuso was correctly willing to wait a couple of weeks more to open Madrid, when her coalition partner Aguado forced her to ask for immediate unlock. Central government didn't consent, so change of position was useless, but now there's a left for lockdown, right for unlock division, that's it.
I won't go into the masks issue. It's too painful to just recall.
To be clear, I think the 8th was a mistake. But at the same time, the opposition was organizing rallies and those were not stopped either. There were also massive football matches. At the time, I think the government simply underestimated what was going on, in a large part because the OMS guidance wasn't prudent enough. The fact the 8M aligns with the government may have entered into it, but it's not clear given other events that happened around those dates.
This is blatantly and shamelessly false. On the day of the rally there were zero reported deaths by covid19 in the entire country, let alone Madrid. By then the total number of confirmed cases in the entire country barely reached 1k.
There isn't a single nation or government in the history of humanity that decided to lock down an entire country just because there was 1k cases of what was described by then as a mere atypical form of viral pneumonia.
But the situation in Italy, our neighbours, was clear enough, no need to be Nostradamus.
There isn't a single nation or government in the history of humanity that decided to lock down an entire country...
You're very good attacking a strawman. Between encouraging massive rallies of hundred of thousands of persons packed in the streets and locking down an entire country, you know, there's a whole lot of intermediate points.
...just because there was 1k cases of what was described by then as a mere atypical form of viral pneumonia.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coronavirus-update-107758-...
So even when WHO (OMS) had declared a pandemic March 11th, there were no policies taking effect before March 15th.
Even I, that has never had any interest in epidemic diseases, started to follow the Sitraps from WHO almost daily from February 24th (even mentioned it in a comment on March 2nd, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464056). Professionals for much longer I assume.
Saying that Spain didn't downplay the threat, as parent 'rumanator' was saying, is therefore not something I can agree with.
On March 8th Spain barely registered 1k cases, and counted zero deaths due to covid19.
The first confirmed death in Spain due to covid19 was registered on March 9th.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Spain
It makes no sense to criticize a democratic government to impose emergency measures a kin of totalitarian and oppressive regimes just because there were barely 1k cases of an atypical pneumonia which even the World Health Organization claimed that wouldn not spread between humans.
- More than 2x population of California
- Next to China geographically
- Zero death from COVID so far [1]
- Has a very active campaign on raising awareness for COVID, including the famous COVID song.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/21/vietnam-has-reported-...
The country has 23M inhabitants, most of them are clustered in a few densely populated metro areas (Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung–Changhua, Taoyuan–Zhongli, Tainan and Hsinchu). Taiwan had many daily flights to/from China, including daily directs from Wuhan (stopped 31 December 2019). Taiwan is one of the world's older countries (median age ~43). Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [2] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. None were confirmed to have COVID-19 after 14 days had passed. (The only advantage Taiwan had was that facemasks were widely used and even expected on public transport for years.) For all those reasons, Taiwan was at unusually high risk from Covid.
Yet, no lockdown.
No country managed the disease better than Taiwan. We should learn from Taiwan. See [1] for an analysis of Taiwan's response from early March 2020.
It is interesting to reflect upon why most countries ignored Taiwan. The World Health Organization's locking out Taiwan on China's request is probably one reason. Is it the only one?
[1] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32125371/
A significant number of ill people is only in Moscow and a couple of other cities, and they are doing good if you compare them to other cities in the world with the same population.
COVID-19 has a significant incubation period and a large number of infections are asymptomatic and even with moderate symptoms people often won't qualify for the limited testing being done. The upshot being that unless there is a nexus with another highly-tested subcommunity in the same community, an outbreak that occurs rapidly and is detected in one subcommunity (in which impacts might be visible sooner through testing) that is disproportionately tested will take several weeks before it has significant visible impacts in the broader community. And by the time it does, it will be impossible to contain.
But those broader impacts are pretty much inevitable unless the those exposed to the outbreak were strictly quarantined from the broader community.
Now think about the percentage of world population that the U.S. accounts for. Our infection rate is inexcusable. And getting worse.
There is a significant portion of the country that has politicized a viral infection -- and that line of thinking is just making this a worse situation.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but don't you need to adjust for population in order to make a meaningful comparison?
“Doing good” because doctors aren’t allowed to attribute death to covid is not really “doing good”.
Title of the article: "Muore di Covid a 30 anni: è la vittima più giovane", which translates into "30-year-old dies of Covid, he's the youngest victim yet".
Article starts with: "Dying younger than 30 for Coronavirus: a cruel fate, that of Michele Grauso, 29-year-old financier (he would have turned thirty in August)."
Second paragraph, finally mentions the small detail that he had also been shot in the head and had been in a coma for 2 years: "He was hospitalized in a vegetative state in a private facility here in the city. A coma from which he had never come out since a partner in 2017 shot him in the head by mistake..."
On TV, most news channels didn't even mention the coma. The family actually complained and it came out.
Not sure if news want to be sensationalistic for clicks, or because they directly get paid to keep the level of panic high by whoever makes money from the emergency (which is many, many people in Italy). Probably both.
Dr. Deborah Brix replied to a reporter asking questions about death coding methods by saying that the U.S. was using liberal methods. In this article Professor Walter Riaccardi (scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health), complains about such coding methods:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
If a lightning hit the hospital and made the power go out and turn his life support off, they would've written he was killed by a lightning.