Going back to normal: how Iceland has dealt with the coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

Going back to normal: how Iceland has dealt with the coronavirus

theatlantic.com

13 pointsyardie14 comments

Every time I read an article about Iceland I feel the need to remind people that it’s a country that is smaller than most medium sized cities.

You don’t see articles written about how Aurora, Colorado dealt with covid, despite the fact that they are the same size.

Things that work for small, homogenous systems rarely work 1:1 on large, heterogenous scales.

We know because the most common comment on anything done by any non-American place that is superior to an American place is to remind us that the achieving place is: more diverse, less diverse, larger, smaller, denser, sparser, more homogeneous, more heterogeneous, or whatever.

Fortunately, the reason I love America (the real culture of aggressive exploitation of gaps and inefficiencies) is alive and well in the real world as much as the culture of excuse-making is alive on the Internet.

In time, I wonder if Americans will split into categories of low-agency online commenters who believe that the greatest factors are environmental and high-agency real-life operatives who believe the greatest factors are things they can control.

This is an absurdly loaded response. I never said anything about America being great. I live in London. I was just making a point for a largely American readership which has a tendency to presume the rest of the world is far better (as you do) without having actually experienced anything else but the US.

There are many small cities in the US fairing very well, just as there are here in the UK. But you’d never read about them because they aren’t sovereign nations.

Sweden is a great example of this. Typically held up by Americans as some sort of utopia, until they became the poster child for cavalier covid handling. Now people just move on and pick some other new comparison.

I've lived in London, Mumbai, San Francisco, and many American cities.

Your original comment is nothing more than the standard "Correlation is not causation" comment of these stories. It's exceedingly low information content and ever-present.

I can’t imagine what this implies then about a comment pointing out how common such comments are. Negative value?

Possibly. I'm trying to get you to stop doing this, however. One can hope that we can talk without repeating endless cliches. If it doesn't work, then we've all paid the cost and gained nothing. If it works, I've paid the cost this time and we never have to pay it in the future.

Alternatively, I'm working with a friend on a way for me to browse HN without encountering these.

Interesting story about the one day test, with an incubation time of two weeks how big are the chances that if contracted on the plane that would show up in a test done the same day?

> with an incubation time of two weeks

Can we stop perpetuating this myth? 14 days is when 99.5% of the people show symptoms. The median, which is far more important, is between 2 to 4 days.

Only it isn't a myth.

"The typical incubation period for COVID‑19 is five or six days, but it can range from one to fourteen days with approximately ten percent of cases taking longer."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019

I could have been more correct by writing 'up to', but if 10% of the cases take longer than 14 days then 99.5% within 14 days should be 90%.

Playing it safe with the incubation time around international arrivals is what has led to authorities the world over adopting the 14 day quarantine.

I've looked up some papers on the maximum incubation period (by no means a comprehensive search):

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32594928/ (14 days in 99.5)

- https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyaa106... (this one says 95% within 14 days)

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7302302/ (preprint, says median is 5.35 days, and says the data support the 14 day intervention policy but gives no data about why so)

Most of the studies are with "old" outbreaks so likely more data is needed. Yet the median is still around 2-6 days.

> Playing it safe with the incubation time

That is, applying the precautionary principle. Not very scientific, but understandable (although I don't agree with it). Personally, now that we're well into the epidemic, I'd expect a little more rigor, though.

Well, given the cost associated with dealing with outbreaks it would make sense to play it safe, precautions have a cost near zero and an outbreak has a fairly large cost especially if not detected soon enough.

They just changed the rules so that now you have to self quarantine for 4-5 days and then get another test. This is after two cases of people testing negative, then feeling ill and testing positive a few days later.

This is just for residents though, tourists can still get away with the single test, reasoning being they don't mingle as much.

Tourists tend to mingle as much or more as normal people do, that may be a mistaken assumption, they also tend to get around a lot.

That new test regime + quarantine makes more sense though.

I suspect that in an ideal world this rule would apply to everyone, but a lot of practical realities drive this decision making in my opinion.

There are some reasons to vindicate it though, as a tourist you mostly keep with your group, if you mingle it's mostly with other tourists I suspect, you don't have all your close friends and relatives or colleagues that you would really spend a lot of time with in variously intimate contact.

On the other hand, as you say they travel a lot more than locals in any given time period.

Time will tell if this makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com