Hacker News Reader

Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Another thing that's helping Australia is that they're heading into summer.

Normalized by population the worst non-tiny (10M+) countries to be right now seem to be France, Italy, Belgium and Poland. And it'd be even worse in France, Italy and Poland in terms of new cases if they had the kind of testing throughput the US has been able to muster (1.24M tests a day). Belgium has comparable normalized test throughput. As far as cases, new cases = positivity * throughput. The higher the throughput, the more cases you are going to get.

View on HN

I just came out of months of hard lockdown in Melbourne.

Everyone wants to downplay our results. But we went hard and obeyed the rules. I really do think we acted exceptionally as the public.

I see what other places with outbreaks are doing, and it seems very lax.

You've only postponed the inevitable though. Virus is gonna virus - it's not going anywhere, ever. I'm not downplaying. I really hope you've used this time to prepare and didn't just sit on your behind hoping it'd go away.

We have substantially improved and increased both testing and tracing and isolation/quarantine.

We have testing in industrial environments that are known to be dangerous (eg abbatoirs, health care).

We have tracing that in the last week caught a single case in a school that ended up with over 800 people in isolation while being tested. Our tracing is not only close contacts, but the close contacts of contacts.

This test/trace infrastructure is being replicated across the country and by next winter, we should have standardized processes.

Work is ongoing in areas like health and aged care, and we are planning for how to bring international students (an important part of our economy) back for the start of the university year in March.

It's not going away, we are actively getting rid of it.

What measures are getting rid of it permanently? Until there is a vaccine, herd immunity is the only path. We won’t rid ourselves completely and it will keep coming back.

Not just "until there's a vaccine", but "until there's a safe and effective vaccine", which is a feat several orders of magnitude harder, that has not been achieved against any other coronavirus.

> getting rid of it

No you aren't. There's no "getting rid of it". Spanish Flu (!) is still with us. It just kinda fizzled out after just about everyone got it over the course of 2+ years, but the virus still endemic, over a hundred years later.

> You've only postponed the inevitable though.

You mean "only" given most people another year or two with their elderly?

Some lost the chance during the lockdown mate

Measles is still out there, it has not been eliminated, there are cases in Africa and South America https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/measles/globalmeaslesoutbre...

Yet we don’t really worry about it in the US: people are (mostly) vaccinated, and getting a visa to enter the country requires vaccination.

Covid might be similar, except given anti vaccine sentiment the US, Australia might have to throw the US on the list alongside Brazil, Nigeria, and the Congo.

Only Belgium of those seems to rank worse than USA for cases/pop. Missing from your list seems to be Israel and Czech Republic (unless your limit for non-tiny country is 11 million).

But even below USA, before we get to France, Italy or Poland; Peru, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia ranks in before.

And most of these countries are testing at lower rates than France.

Do you mean infections/pop? Cases/pop is irrelevant, just like the CFR is.

That's only if you fail at basic arithmetics. All of them are worse than the US. Scaled up to US population, France would have 190K new cases per day. Italy - 168K. Poland - 185K. And so on and so forth down the list.

That wasn't particularly clear from your 'worst non-tiny countries' (which out of context just sounds mean-spirited). So you meant in terms of new cases, not total cases?

Yes, since the original article is about new cases, not totals per se. Normalized totals will be the same everywhere - everyone will get it eventually.

This may turn out to be true but is far from clear.

On a side note are there any sites that lists country level data about cases per day, normalised to population density?

Raw population density can be misleading.

Australia for example has a 25mill population at ~3people per km2. This is effectively worthless as a measure as ~95% of the country's population lives in major cities with population density of 4k-8k per km2.

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/

Not that I know of. The stats are designed to be maximally impenetrable and misleading, and I'm not entirely sure why. Basically the stats that matter are: hospitalizations, ICU bed utilization, and excess deaths. Everything else is bullshit. Yet you won't find any of these stats for most countries, certainly not in an easy to digest form.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com