> ... the French and the Spanish and Italians and the UK all had disastrous outbreaks as well, but as Eastern Europe and other places have shown, it didn't need to be that way.
The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already).
Some cities and countries had lots of travel in Week 9 (Week of feb 24) because of holidays. This is e.g. All of Belgium, and the Stockholm region in Sweden.
In Sweden its striking how much better regions that had the holiday just one week later fared (e.g. Sweden's second and third largest cities).
Obviously an initial/seed outbreak of 5000 infected people in a city, compared to an initial outbreak of 50 people will be very different.
It's like commentators on this particular subject assume this diseases was distributed evenly across all countries and the outcomes after that depends on the mitigations
applied...
It's also peculiar how some routes didn't incur a lot of spread but others did. E.g. compare the travel from the Italian alps to Scandinavia - tons of people infected. But packed high speed trains between Lombardy and Rome left several times per day during the time when lots were infected but no lockdowns were in place, yet Rome managed with a lot less disease. No one can really explain that yet. Is it something about how the virus spreads that makes planes worse than trains? Is it something about the particular population in Rome having had a Coronavirus cold last season that Lombardy didn't? Who knows.