Covid-19 in Iceland: Violated Isolation and Infected over 100
icelandreview.com
icelandreview.com
A case in point, 3 German tourists will be getting a flight home from New Zealand after deciding they could sail into the country.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/12290190...
In the story you linked, any reasonable person would have let the Germans dock.
They had been isolated at sea for more than 14 days, and applied for a docking permit through the appropriate channel, and stated they needed to repair their boat.
The NZ government has a process which they used, but rejected them based on a procedural technicality.
Shit NO. Extracts from article below:
“Their application was declined because the Director-General of Health was not reasonably satisfied that the ship had a compelling need to arrive in New Zealand that reached the high threshold required”
“People in vessels travelling to New Zealand to avoid the cyclone season in the Pacific may have other genuine humanitarian reasons or other compelling needs for coming, which would need to be demonstrated in order for these vessels to qualify for an exemption – but financial loss alone is unlikely to meet the criteria.”
“‘As much as our country is known for its hospitality, New Zealand cannot become a maritime Covid-19 safe haven for everyone in unfortunate circumstances’.”
“Immigration NZ’s national manager of border and visa operations Peter Elms said their decision to knowingly travel here without approval “0’demonstrates a blatant disregard for New Zealand’s border restrictions’.”
NZ has nearly eradicated Covid again, so we are a desirable destination, and we need to ensure we are strict otherwise every Tomaz, Diyk, und Harri will be sailing here.
They knew exactly what they were trying on, and had been firmly told that NZ does not want any yachts to winter over: “Upwards of 300 small yachts are stuck in limbo across the South Pacific, mostly in Fiji and French Polynesia.” from https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
I understand the worry that the tourists feel, stuck on their yachts. But NZ has decided we don’t want them, so they need to find another solution to their travel problems. This isn’t some sudden problem and they have had many months to sort out some solution, rather than hoping NZ might be lenient.
NZ is desperately trying to eradicate Covid, and we stand a chance of doing it, so long as we don’t do stupid shit like trusting tourists (who seem to regularly ignore lockdown rules and have been superspreaders in other countries).
This is exactly the part I am rather confused by. Do the scientific advisors actually believe that there is no safe way to quarantine these tourists or that they pose an actual risk? It seems that it would be trivial from a logistics perspective for NZ do derisk the situation and the competent health advisors there would understand how.
Reading between the lines of what you are saying, it sounds like this is a political issue in NZ where the population feels afraid and hostile towards outsiders. Of course the collective people of NZ have the right to set immigration policy as they choose, as a matter of national sovereignty. I am simply curious as to why it is the way it is.
Nice. Just to be clear, there isn't a process. There is the ability to get an exemption. It's a default no.
It's particularly galling when the person with this mindset is also responsible for writing those very rules:
I think there is an element of proportionality missing here. In this case, it's a very low risk of what? Well, it's a very low risk of going through yet another lock down. The previous one cost the NZ economy billions and threw something like 10% of their population out of work.
In case the picture isn't clear, I'm an Australian. We have benefit of experience here. One state, Victoria, managed to screw up their quarantine regime. The result has been over 700 deaths, and 100's of billions of dollars in lost work, and an economy that shrank by 40%.
The other extreme is Western Australia. Unlike the rest of Australia's states, they shut their borders completely, turning themselves into almost a country within a country. They have been and continue to be heavily criticised for it. The outcome has been no new cases for months, no lockdown whatsoever for months, and they are the only state whose economy grew in the last quarter.
In economic terms, it's very clear what the right course of action is. And given the cost of just one case leaking through the quarantine wall, I'm sort of surprised the penalties aren't hasher to send the strongest possible message. Burn the boat maybe?
I found myself recently attempting to explain to someone who seems strongly motivated not to understand the principle that a crisis can be both enduring and critical, in answer to the false assertion that “ongoing crises are not emergencies.”
Iceland proves my point. As has New Zealand recently: "Covid 19 coronavirus: 5 new cases as Jacinda Ardern reveals alert level call" (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...)
This thing is with us until it isn’t. Covid operates on its own schedule, not ours. People not being selfish idiots would help one hell of a lot to speed the process and lower risks, deaths, and costs, however.
The way the border guard approached the subject, made it seem like he was worried that I would flip out at having my movements restricted. I'm guessing, but I think this was because I travel on an Australian passport, and the assumption becomes that I'm a tourist and that it will ruin my holiday.
As soon as I started talking about my isolation plans (I even went to the supermarket in Sweden before the ferry[2]), he relaxed a lot. It became "very good then, carry on".
I do wonder how many people are becoming unreasonable in situations like this.
[1] You can take tests to shorten it.
[2] It is allowed to go to the supermarket here while in isolation, but I didn't know that before arriving.
Exactly the kind that will break mandatory isolation and are way more likely to have an ongoing covid infection than a random person from the general population, due to overall careless behaviour.
The sensible people are all waiting in their homes.
So yes, I guess the border guard you spoke to has had to endure tantrums from these people on a daily basis
It does not matter if you travel to the next city or to the country nearby. Yes, there are clusters but at least in Europe we do not have vast empty areas between populated places. It is pretty much a continuum.
Tourists also tend to have much different riskier behaviour compared to the average native inhabitant of a city (eg nightclub hopping many days in a row)
Pushback on masks or any type of covid-altered behavior is not limited to "walmart meltdown" youtube social shame videos.
While it has been walked back, poll workers in a Missouri county were told: "You may act surprised that you don’t have a face mask on properly and then apologize as you put the mask on,” “Wear your mask correctly until the voter leaves the polling place. Please do this every time a voter says something to you.”
[1] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/516943-st-...
Would be an interesting stat. I would hope not that many but expect a large population given they'd be people who have elected to take short-term vacations in foreign country during a pandemic, they'd either be very self-centered or not very bright.
In my opinion, not quite. What it highlights is that non-pharmaceutical interventions like quarantines and lockdowns are at best tools (very blunt tools) to slow down the virus. But you can't win against it with them alone.
In this case, negligence, but you can imagine that errors can and will be made simply because we aren't perfect. And the spread will start again.
It is a completely unsustainable strategy on the long run, and that's why countries (at least the ones which can afford that) should look more into pharmaceutical development and therapeutic options.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22528060
It's possible for diseases to drop below the noise floor or sustaining transmissiion (plague, hantavirus), or for mutual evolution to reduce severity (rhinoviruses, influenza). Vaccines will likely be the long-term resolution, but this likely remains 2+ years off by optimistic estimates (WHO, Bill Gates).
I consider a fair probability that an eendemic state will be the new normal.
Secondly, vaccines work, but people forget pharmacological treatments, which can make a terrible disease manageable. As someone with a background in pharmacology, it baffles me when these options are never considered (like a post, probably trolling, which I saw on HN once, "The drugs don't work. Enjoy your 24 months quarantine").
Secondly, the "2+ years off" depends on the estimates. These are estimates made with previous experience, where one could afford waiting, if need be. This is not the case.
"We can't wait 18-24 months", said at one point CanSino's CEO. I agree with him. Drugs or vaccines should, if the tests allow it (and despite the popular thinking, the current vaccines aren't rushed, the speed is mainly done because a lot of money has been poured into recruitment and monitoring) make sure that the situation is it at least lessened before that.
Because if not, people will start blatantly ignoring any recommendations from authorities (and that would also mean governments becoming even more heavy-handed than today, which is already worrying).
At the moment we have an entire school shut down and increased restrictions and nothing has actually changed the dynamic so that miscreants won't ruin the progress after this 3rd wave passes. Due to this latest outbreak we're now at a daily infection risk rate of 87 or so, well above the 50 mark other countries use to determine risky countries.
The tourists should be named, shamed, fined and put back on a plane immediately.
I can't believe people continue to use CFR for evaluating risk. It's a totally worthless metric, and now that we have serological studies, an approximation of the IFR is available. The IFR is somewhere around 0.5% plus or minus.
The disease is effectively the same the whole world over and is equally fatal the whole world over. The reason for an order of magnitude spread in CFR is because Iceland is testing everyone (hence approximating the actual fatality rate, IFR) whereas every other country is testing different groups.
Yes the fatality rate is 4% for people who walk into hospital hugely ill. This is a sampling bias. It's like saying skydiving is 99% fatal based on counting only people whose parachutes failed to deploy. Then presenting the risk as "anywhere between 0.001% and 99%."
It's about 0.5% across the whole population. Much lower for children (lower than the flu). About the same as the flu for 20s and 30s people, particularly healthy ones. It's much, much higher for old sick people (20-30% in a nursing home, for instance).
There's no way to say 2-16 deaths based on the 400 infected by multiplying 400 by 0.5%; it could be zero if the 400 infected were kids, and it could be 150 if the French folks did a tour of nursing homes.
[edit] 'just-juan-post' provided a link to a study indicating my figures are overstated and the fatality rates are probably half that. [1]
We're not actually testing everyone here, it's a common repeated trope from international news but testing is readily available to all who want to and we test all inbound arrivals via the single airport (now we do, didn't before). They can either self quarantine for 14 days after that or get another test in 4-5 days.
People are pointing to these "fatality rates" as though they're accurate, consistent and fair representations of the risk the disease poses to individuals. That's simply not the case. They're correct, but they're different and inconsistent.
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-08-12/long-covid-what-is-it-wh...
https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus-complications
From WebMD: "Some people -- about 1 in 6 -- will have complications, including some that are life-threatening."
From ITV: "a study by King's College London found an estimated 10% of people with the virus take at least three weeks to recover, with 250,000 people in the UK alone thought to experience symptoms for 30 days or more. Many of those experiencing long tail coronavirus were fit, active people whose lives have been completely turned upside down by the ongoing symptoms."
I think there is an assumption that if you contract something that puts people in the ICU, you should expect your life to be permanently altered by it. I suspect that assumption is helping mute attempts to collect and quantify that data.
Sketchy news rehosting site run by two people is sketchy.
Current studies suggest there are up to six distinct strains.
https://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/covid-19-l-islande-dement...
Interesting. Do you have any source that corroborates that story?
Global:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Iceland:
It seems you didn't understood my question.
I asked for any source that substantiates your claim that a pair of French tourists were responsible for 400 infections.
You said, and I quote, "The selfishness and criminal negligence of two French tourists has resulted in 400 new infections and counting".
I asked for a source that substantiates that specific claim.
Do you have any source for that assertion?
There are reasons aggregators are useful.
We do have some tuning knobs though, including vertical risk-stratification, which has collected dust around the world.
It is possible to have a much more acute and accelerated course among the least vulnerable populations while isolating the more vulnerable populations.
Whether Iceland and New Zealand will be viewed as successes depends in part on how much misery is inflicted during the long period it will take to finally reach herd immunity in those places, and how many people in vulnerable sub-populations are infected along the way.
That also doesn't take into account long term impacts that are not fatal.
...what? My comment was about risk-stratification. "Population x Fatality Rate" is the formula we are resigned to use because we're not doing risk-stratification.
This is what Katz, Ioannidis, Gupta, Osterholm, etc. (it, many of the most trusted experts on this topic) have been saying all along, and being ignored not only in the hugely ignorant US response, but also in the more sophisticated ones.
> That also doesn't take into account long term impacts that are not fatal.
Yes, there are rare complications from all viruses that can cause long-term disease. But we're fighting a pandemic right now, so it's probably not time to focus on phenomena of rounding-error incidence and which are not unique to this virus.
This is the new narrative and it makes no sense. The largest impact of this virus are the elderly and they can get long term effects from any infection, bacterial or viral. I read the 60+ person UK case study on long term effects published out of Charlottesville and almost all the major conditions were in the elderly or high risk workers (possibly medial workers; the paper didn't say for privacy reasons).
It's way too early to talk about "long term effects," when this hasn't even been around that long. Remember that 96% of fatalities in the US are people 55 and over, most of those in long-term care and retirement facilities. The areas that were hit the worst (Michigan, California, Kirkland/Seattle) were all cases of bad policy in regards to nursing homes.
For specifics on Covid, I think look for materials from John Ioannidis (a long-time personal hero of mine) if you're interested in the research side, or David Katz (also someone I have followed closely for a while - kind of a MD version of Michael Pollan) if you're interested in the clinical side.
Both have published papers if that's a good medium for you, and both have solid videos on youtube if that's more your speed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opinion/coronavirus-econo...
If you have specific references in mind, it's rather more efficient, and considerate, to list them yourself.
Even though they've mostly had elimination (with one re-lockdown due to Auckland), I do agree it's a bad long term strategy. The T-Cell immunity research shows there may be more people who are immune than we think, and Sweden shows us this virus can safely burn out in a population.
People from NZ may not be able to safely travel out/into their nation for years.
I am very doubtful of a safe vaccine in any reasonable amount of time. Fatalities have dropped to the floor across the board, so everyone is going on and on about cases. We don't even collect the viral load amounts for PCR tests in most countries, so we have no idea how many infections are just traces of virus, versus full infections.
This whole show has been a clusterfuck. I think my predictions from March are coming true:
https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/covid-19-is-two-disease...
As far as I understand from the currently-available data, at best, cross-reactive T cells may lessen the disease, but not prevent it. However, the data are not definitive.
It reminds me of the Christmas Day truces, we were able to put aside our differences for a day.
But it seems we're incapable of understanding this doesn't apply to virology. Covid doesn't care if it's your wedding, sisters birthday or that your fathers dying.
We seem to assume that it has some kind of humanity or that the just lowering my mask to say something once won't have any affect.
Sept 2020, Annals of Internal Medicine
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-5352
People aged 40 or below have a .01% chance of dying.
People over the age of 70 have a 1.17% chance of dying.
Overall the chance of dying from the virus is 0.26%.
I encourage you to share this information.
The only reason it's limited to as low as 100 is that people are taking precautions to prevent the infection from spreading.
(don't downvote people who are asking a technical question!)
5.7 would be the average (and it's an estimate, with many variables, some of which change from place to place and over time) of all these.
I hope these people get to make civil claims against the couple.
That's immoral, unethical and insane:
Not specifically talking about these supposed two French tourists. Iceland obviously has had domestic cases of individuals who believe the virus to be a hoax, and thus decided not to quarantine after being tested positive.
These individuals were, according to memory, held against their will during the remainder of their quarantine and fined.