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Comment by gattilorenz | Hacker News Reader

> For that matter, much of the world seems to be celebrating they are doing better than the US while ignoring signs that thier luck is running out.

A large part of Europe (not to mention Asia) already dealt/is dealing with it significantly better than the US. I doubt it's a matter of luck.

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I second this.

Try to have a look at the statistics of Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, Norway, Thailand, Denmark: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Seems that some countries manage to _consistently_ keep the spread at a comfortable (for a lack of better word) level.

Denmark isn't requiring masks and from what I've read, not many people are wearing them.

And Vietnam went 100 days without an new case and are now dealing with an outbreak they can't trace back to a source.

Vietnam has total confirmed cases of 642, out of 96 million population. When they have a few dozen patients, they call it a new outbreak.

The US has ~60k daily new cases - that is, 642 new patients about every 15 minutes.

But I remember very clearly the period in late February and early March when authorities in every country were making that same claim. "We only have a few dozen patients, which is nothing like the true outbreaks in Iran and Italy, we'll surely be able to get it under control without extreme measures." Is there a reason to expect Vietnam's current outbreak will follow a different trajectory?

And some of these countries made good on the claim. New Zealand has 23 active cases. Taiwan has 27. South Korea has 808 (that's after having a cult church being a hotbed of infection and its members actively hindering government intervention).

Hell, even Italy now has only 12,474 active cases.

Right, for now.

We're not even a year into a multiple year pandemic. Yes, it's great those countries have it under control now, but I don't feel comfortable assuming it will stay that way.

I don’t disagree with your numbers.

My point is Vietnam has been very strict about controlling for new cases and even then, a bunch popped up and they don’t know 100% how that happened.

Just because there are others doing better doesn't mean it's not luck. One might expect success to be pareto-distributed , so when you are looking at 100+ countries, there are bound to be some that are much better off than others, for innocuous or random reasons (e.g. "luck")

I suspect that, for any given location, the current outcome is some combination of government preparation/policy, people's behavior, luck, density, isolation, and previous number of infections/deaths.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's very easy to cherry-pick factors that can be used to explain why one country seems to be doing well or poorly. But then you have to explain why the country next door seemed to do so differently.

The attitude that any country has "already dealt with it" is exactly what's concerning. The history of this year is just an endless sequence of people saying "we've got it, it's under control now" before getting smashed by a huge new spike of cases. Many countries did better than the US, and many of the ones who didn't at least suppressed the virus more - but now a lot of them are following in the US's lead and continuing to reopen as cases rise.

there is an ocean of difference between dealing with a manageable amount of infections that allows contact tracing and an explosion of cases that we are having here in the US and in certain counties in California

The question is whether contact tracing can reliably prevent a manageable amount of infections from turning into an explosion. It's failed to do so in many countries.

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