Covid: Belgian doctors with coronavirus asked to keep working
bbc.com
bbc.com
E.g Flanders: Schools are not a problem vs Wallonia: Schools are a problem.
It's frustrating to see.
But I have the impression Belgium is not unique here. Most of the first world is doing bad.
I get the impression our political generation is systemically mismanaging for at least 20 years, and this crisis is the first of a level that makes it extremely obvious in all our countrys at the same time.
The new generation won't be any better. There simply aren't enough people who care enough to enter politics or do something about the situation. The system hasn't changed and the people that enter politics will still largely be those who do it for personal gain.
We all like to complain, but the majority won't do a thing because it cares more about which series, useless gadget or trend was released recently. And when we (the majority) do go to the polls, we vote for personal gain, not for the good of others.
Same in France. I really wonder who takes decisions and on what basis. Some rules are ridiculous. Right now, there's a curfew in most of the country. There are exceptions though. For instance, you need to sign a document if you want to walk your dog after 9 pm (the document attests you're indeed walking your dog). And of course, you have to wear a mask, even though the streets are empty.
This sounds like a rejected Monty Python sketch. “Pardon, monsieur; why are you out after curfew?” “I’m walking my dog!” “What dog?” “I have the paperwork right here.” “Very well; bonne nuit!”
If it wasn't mandatory, people could stay out all night and go wherever they wanted provided they were bringing a dog with them.
(I have friends in Belarus who have confirmed this as well)
I have to imagine any place with nightclubs open indoors doesn't care too much anywhere.
Now, it might be that the new cases this time are less severe, I don't know. But it's a second wave.
1) The data you showed literally displays a full blown tidal wave 'second wave' hitting Sweden, 1500 cases/day in a country of 8M people and growing exponentially is absolutely a 'second wave'. Seriously, what are you looking at? That rate of expansion, if not controlled with further social modifications, will overwhelm the country in about 3 weeks.
(Remember that quite some number of people need to be hospitalized, that the hospitals have to refuse other patients, that it will force other lockdowns, and it eventually will trickle to the older people - who will die.)
2) Sweden avoided an 'initial lockdown' but most countries only did a 'lock down' for several weeks. Otherwise, a lot of the de-facto policies have been quite similar. As of 4 weeks ago I suggest Sweden was 'on par' with the rest of the Western world.
Whatever Sweden did at the end of June, where you can see a precipitous drop - they will obviously have to do again.
I can't think of another liberal democracy besides NZ that has handled COVID well, and they are a small island country. It's embarrassing, because the response has been terrible on both purely financial and humanitarian levels.
I don't see the case for calling the GP disingenuous though.
But it’s not the only factor: well-managed healthcare systems, clear government policy and action, and public support for controls are also important.
e.g.
- Vietnam: landlocked, populous, excellent internal response: just over 1000 cases and 35 deaths; approx. 60 active cases currently
- UK + Ireland: quite frankly a bit of a mess
That is mostly true. However, I would note that Ireland were kinda screwed in some respects by the border with Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK and thus has the incredibly poor response of England and the Tories. We've definitely made a bunch of mistakes, but it would have been a lot easier to deal with Covid were it not for the border (and our vast under-investment in our health service over the last 20-30 years).
It's worth noting that the UK cases are far worse than they seem, as uniquely amongst European nations, they only test symptomatic people, even though we know that asymptomatic spread is a big problem with Covid.
Population 70 million.
Total cases 3,743
Deaths 59
After a (relatively) small second wave spike in one of the states (Victoria) which is now under control, there are very few cases of community transmission.
It’s the result of a combination of: controlled island borders, unpopular but effective internal hard borders between some states, mandatory managed hotel quarantine for inbound passengers, well-executed contact tracing by health departments, broad access to PCR testing now returning results usually within 12-24 hours, and a population that’s been surprising willing to “take one for the team” and go into lockdowns and wear masks when needed.
Famous last words. See e.g. France.
Essentially, the EU (in general) had a terrible first wave, and then said well we need the summer for our economies, and now we are paying the price for that.
Having good or at least recently tested public health infrastructure and lucking into a good head of state/governing coalition seems to be key.
99% of their culture is not based on the cultural vestiges as we articulate then 'in law'.
They technically have some institutions which mirror 'Western Liberal Democracy' but they are not remotely like Western nations in that sense.
Taiwan, Singapore are also technically a lot like 'Western Liberal Democracies' but we can see they absolutely are not, right there in their COVID responses.
They are indeed noteworthily 'different'.
Strangely, although Canada was much better prepared (from SARS-1 in 2003) than the USA (CDC fiasco) and their politicians listened to "science", they haven't done as well as expected.
Their death rate is half that of the USA so far, but that's still almost 10,000 dead for a population of 37 million, vs. 200,000 dead for US population of 320 million.
Some of the spread and deaths were from farm labor continuing to cross the border from Mexico to Ontario during the lockdown.
I think there are some elements of luck, demographics, and geography here.
Mind you, I am not advocating to follow an authoritarian/Chinese model.
But the analysis that neoliberalism (and the hyper-individualist mentality that it co-evolved with) have undermined any collective effort at containing this effectively seems valid to me, or at least worthy of discussion.
Financially, we have eroded our capability to respond to this in a timely manner. Our healthcare and test/trace capabilities were simply not up to snuff, even though the people that know most about them kept sounding the alarms.
Philosophically (and IMHO this is the more contestable part of my opinion) our individualist societies have eroded our capability to demand (let alone volunteer!) personal sacrifice for a collective good, even one that indirectly benefits us and our direct peers.
Alas, give the developments and debate around this, I don't see anyone working through this after the fact. We'll all want to move on, forget that 2020 ever existed, and hope that economic growth will lead us into the golden twenties we've all been waiting for.
This time it will definitely work and not screw us all over in the next cycle, we'll say. Or at least next time I will be on the winning side! Just you wait!
Now, you're probably right that a few decades ago the response to something like Covid wouldn't be seen as such a disaster - but that's mostly because expectations were different back then. If you take a look at some of the flu pandemics, they were a mess in terms of things like school closures and other measures, but as far as I can tell this was just seen as normal and inevitable.
(Obviously, countries which had bad experiences with SARS do have very different pandemic planning - but SARS was a much better candidate for cotainment and elimination than Covid is.)
Japan's politicans are no less incompetent than other 1st world countries and geographically they should be much worse off but their cases are way down compared to other places.
The reason why Italy was the epicenter is a bit of a mystery though. There's hints they screwed up their Covid testing and managed, pretty much uniquely among Western countries, to not actually test people hospitalized with potential symptoms who didn't have links to travellers from China, meaning that they only detected community spread when someone who did happen to have contact with someone who travelled from there caught it from someone else. But there doesn't seem to be much coverage of this at least in English-language media; everyone's focused on arguing that their country did worse than Italy because Italy was caught by suprise, whereas everyone else had them as a warning, without examining how they ended up getting caught by surprise. It's also not a full explanation. Possibly it just came down to random chance.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v...
It's quite unknown for countries far away from them, ironically US was pretty good prepared before Trump.
The '1st wave' was understandable - crude measures in an emergency, fair enough.
But should have a much more nuanced understanding of the situation by now, and be able to focus on smart but clear policies.
There was a 'sweet spot' coming out of the lockdowns that would work well, but we moved past it, and how we're playing a game of 'back and forth'.
For example, we probably don't need lockdowns or curfews at all, they are a little totalitarian and probably do nothing but get people super mad.
We probably need to stop social gatherings of all kinds, limit social bubbles to nuclear units.
On TikTok I see way, way too much intermingling among especially young people who are unambiguously driving the second wave.
We also probably need to support our local businesses as we can and 'keep things moving' i.e. 'Remember to Get Takeout'.
In Canada Unis opened up, there were house parties, dorm parties, bars with drunk student what the goddam hell were they thinking? How about: nobody in your house/dorm unless they live there, 'outdoor beer gardens' only, limit 2 beers. Have a 'dance party' in a big open parking lot to break the social malaise. Otherwise threaten expel students who break the established rules for putting other people's lives at risk.
We have almost stopped talking about 'isolation' and we have no support for it. In Taiwan, they send you home, show up at your door with masks, call you every day to check up on you. That kind of 'nudging' would be hugely impactful, it's also a form of tracing.
The US is largely still in a rolling first wave; the separate nation-wide peaks are the result of the fact that not everywhere got hit at the same time, so, e.g., New York had hit it's first peak and bent things downward before much of the country had even noticeably been hit at all. There's some places that are in genuine second waves, but much of the country is still experience it's first wave (often in a post-lockdown climb after a lockdown-generated plateau.)
However - if you break down by state - it looks fairly clearly that we are in a '2cnd wave' of a totally different kind: it's younger people driving the infections, and the case fatality rate is a lot lower.
They were thinking "My risk from COVID is exceptionally low, as is the risk of everyone I live with." I don't understand why this seems crazy to anyone. More college students die from suicide every year than would die if they all got COVID (in the US, assuming that current mortality rates hold). Many colleges are even self-contained, in a way, because they're a "college town" wherein everything revolves around the college.
If there were a single group of people that I would say were in a good demographic to be out of quarantine, it would be college students. They're unlikely to die from the disease, they're far less likely to live with someone in a risky group, and they're old enough to make a decision on whether they want to quarantine or not. They're also unlikely to overwhelm medical services, given the rate that they're asymptomatic at.
? Because it's contagious and when cut loose cases literally widespread death, massive economic peril and joblessness ?
Why is that so hard to understand?
Do people not feel any responsibility for others they infect with potentially deadly pathogens that spread to large numbers of people?
We're not that hugely concerned about 'other people taking small risks' - the issue is the externalization.
Frat Houses can drink '24 beers' and visit the hospital, okay, 'it's their body' ... but the issue with COVID is mostly systematic.
We don't care that you as an individual want to bring 'Deadly Asian Wasps' into North America, it's not a big deal, but by introducing them, you'll cause calamity as they spread through the region causing mayhem. Or like setting a 'small fire' in a dry forest.
I'm struggling to understand how people think a their contagion is a 'personal choice'.
People who think about 'personal choice and living with the consequences' may want to contemplate the liability in such a situation: you hit someone's car - you owe them the repairs. Imagine if you had to pay for someone's healthcare if you were to 'infect them'. Instead of passing 'mask laws' maybe liability laws could be passed -> you infect someone, they sue you for $50-500K. We'd literally have to buy insurance for that, and one of the criteria for insurance would be 'mask wearing' - if you 'wear a mask' your 'infection liability insurance' premiums would be 1/2. It's obviously not going to work, point being it illustrates the systematic issue here, it's not 'personal risk taking'.
So many people are getting ill but a lot less are ending up in hospital than March-April. I find the discussion about number of cases to be a distraction.
There are 2500 patients in intensive care in France. Far from the 7000 at the peak but they were just 1000 one month ago and 1500 two weeks ago.
Only 20% of cases turn into hospitalizations, and only a small percentage of hospitalizations turn into deaths... but that's the general pipeline. The exact % changes depending on population dynamics (who gets sick, and where), but the biggest contributing factor is the number of people in the previous stage of the pipeline. (If you double cases, then a few weeks later, hospitalizations will almost certainly double).
If a case-spike happens, the idea is to make a decision BEFORE hospitalization spikes up a few weeks later. We want to be ahead of the wave, not behind it.
If I'm reading that spanish correctly: its "Number of daily cases" (casos diarios) on the top, with "number of deaths" (Muertos) on the bottom, both in Madrid alone.
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The first wave is clearly wreaked by undertesting the population: Spain probably just didn't have enough tests to really count the cases back then. But for the 2nd wave (going until today), the death numbers clearly went up a few weeks after the case-count went up.
The case-count has begun to decline in Madrid, I think they're "over the hump" (knock on wood...). So looking forward, they're in a good spot.
But you can clearly see: when cases go up, deaths go up soon afterwards. When cases go down, the deaths go down soon afterwards.
Not in Madrid. From your own link, the number of new cases in Madrid has been holding steady around 2,500-3,500 for a month now [0]. Since the average hospital stay for Covid-19 is around 20 days, the in-flow and out-flow of patients in hospital beds should reach a steady state. In fact, you can see from [1] that the number of new cases was higher in september than in october, so we should expect to see a slight decline in hospital occupation over the first few weeks of october, which is exactly what the charts show [2].
So if you start your post with a falsehood, what value does the rest of your post have?
[0] https://www.epdata.es/casos-diarios-coronavirus-lugar-ultimo...
[1] https://www.epdata.es/evolucion-nuevos-casos-diarios-coronav...
[2] https://www.epdata.es/porcentaje-camas-hospital-ocupadas-pac...
I believe we're still in for a few surprises, and I can only pray the magnitude of those surprises remains tolerable.