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Comment by pasabagi | Hacker News Reader

> worst Covid deaths per capita

I think the point is that the countries that have worse deaths-per-capita are poor (eastern european states), conspicuously dysfunctional (Belgium), or both dysfunctional and unlucky (Italy).

The UK was positioned to do well (it's an island, has a national health service, very low vaccine hesitancy, had lots of warning), and yet did badly both on deaths and the economy. The story of the UK and covid was one of unforced errors, not of an impossible challenge.

PS: probably most importantly, the UK has a relatively young population (median age 40, vs Italy at 46, Germany at 49, etc).

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The UK is not an island in any meaningful sense, because we have many of the the busiest airports and we are functionally dependent on imported food.

The idea we could close borders unilaterally before anyone else did is, I'm afraid, nearly delusional. It is a populist fantasy.

We have the worst deaths per capita largely because of the interconnectedness (not the density) of our populations; it is not how many people live in one place, but how many people live in one place and work in another.

This is for example part of why the Czech Republic, which is not at all a poor state -- it has a very low rate of poverty, low unemployment and high rates of GDP growth -- did so incredibly badly, after an initial phase of successful mask-wearing. No matter what you do, when your population is so heavily interconnected within itself and with its neighbours, complacency kills.

Median age plus the proportion of multigenerational families and homes in multiple occupation) is what made things so bad for Italy. The latter -- multiple families and multiple generations in single dwellings -- is also one of the complicating factors for the north of England vs the south.

Japan is also not 'an island in any meaningful sense'. Yet it seems like when it came to coronavirus, it was an advantage. It's obviously easier to control borders when everybody needs to go through passport control to enter or exit.

Japan is surely far less of an international transport hub, for one obvious difference?

Many things in Japan were advantageous (a culture that leans more towards collectivism and social thinking) but considering it's now abundantly obvious that SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus, I suspect it will come down more to pre-established habitual mask-wearing and the higher-tech air conditioning that Japan needs to function.

We could never have closed our borders in a meaningful sense for any meaningful length of time, and this is mirrored in the fact that most of Europe kept its borders open to us for long periods of time. We could have been isolated from the start, but in practice that was selective.

> We could never have closed our borders in a meaningful sense for any meaningful length of time

I've been traveling in and out of the UK throughout the pandemic, and my observation is:

  - You don't have to close borders to have strong controls. The 'PCR test before travel' + 'test on day 2 and 8' would have been pretty robust if implemented at the right time.

  - These measures were consistently implemented at the wrong time. For instance, when the delta wave was starting, there were no restrictions. When it was peaking in the UK, there were strong controls, even when you were coming from a country with a low incidence rate.

My general opinion is that the UK did the right measures[0], but consistently with the wrong timing. It's generally been the case that border controls have been harsh when they were most unnecessary, and weak when they were most needed. It's stupid to have to quarantine for ten days when you're traveling into a country that has multiple orders of magnitude higher infection rates, and no mask mandates - but that's what I was doing last year.

[0]: across the board, not exclusively in regards to travel.

> My general opinion is that the UK did the right measures[0], but consistently with the wrong timing.

Absolutely this.

The reason is Boris Johnson. I mean, quite literally. There is a cycle of him lurching between different Churchillian aspects -- freedom-and-damn-them-all-to-hell to fight-them-on-the-beaches and back. And he only ever changed to the latter position after the evidence was unavoidable, because he's psychologically incapable of thinking about anyone but himself and how history would perceive him personally.

He is absolutely the fundamental reason why this country can only act out of expedience and urgency.

So, you take easter european states (half of eu), and choose Belgium and Italy with 'caveats' to make the UK look bad. I think this is exactly what the gp was talking about.

I just checked, the deaths per million, the difference in the UK and France is of 0.03% (yes, 0.03%, basically 300 more people/million died in the UK than France).

ps: not even British, but hate selective cherry picking.

Sheesh, you don't like "selective" data but you just say "0.03%" without a bigger context.

For fiction's sake: if France only had 50 deaths/million and according to your "only 300 more people/million more" the UK would have 350 deaths/million, that's "only 0.03% more" but geez, 7x more deadly in the UK than in France!

According to [1], the UK has so far 2351.99 deaths/M and France has 1868.02. The rate of death is 26% higher in the UK.

And that's 0.186% vs 0.235% rate of death. 0.049% (or even 0.03% from your data) is still a big jump.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

So, first, I used [1] this which show 2304 in uk vs 2002 in France. I don't have an account so I can't check sources, but find the difference between your dataset and mine for France quite significant and not sure which one to trust. (this difference has nothing to do with your reply, just find it strange)

So, based on your data: Country | total deaths | population (mm) | % death France: | 125,269 | 67.06 | 0.186% UK: | 157,194 | 66.83 | 0.235%

I don't care so much about the % higher when we are dealing with these kinds of numbers. Is the same as 'eating red meat increases your changes of colon cancer by 10%!!!!` and then you see it increased it from 0.01% to 0.011% (or something like that).

For me, you can find a million explanations for that small difference in the numbers, and I doubt it can be attributed to UK's government handling of the situation.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

Shrugs, I should've learnt trying to debate people on the Internet is useless, they come up with their justifications why they were right in the first place.

I guess I should start saying my net worth is about 0.1% lower than Jeff Bezos', on the 10E+16 scale or whatever the correct number maybe, I should ask you, you're better at maths.

One of those Eastern European states - the Czech Republic - was actually the big European success story everyone in the UK press pointed to as proof that the UK should've been able to do better if we had competent leaders. They ended up with the worst Covid deaths per capita in Europe until their neighbours overtook them, and yet I'm sure they still contribute to the belief the UK failed. In reality it seems like they were the ones who got lucky early on and had the chance to do well but failed to take advantage of that, with issues like poor vaccine uptake there. On the other hand, the cities which got hit next after Italy were New York and London, both of which had lots of travel from Milan due to Fashion Week right around the time there was massive undetected community spread there. That's definitely unlucky.

Complacency is absolutely what did the damage in the Czech Republic, complicated by antivax sentiment later on. They didn't get lucky -- mask policy really helped -- but the political class then foolishly began to believe the worst was over.

Believing the worst was over, ignoring nascent evidence that it was not, and constructing policy around that belief, and then reversing it when the truth entered the chat also explains our lurching bouts of competence and incompetence in the UK.

Well, that's the other thing: there was a time when the UK did have top-tier per-capita death rates, so that's where the idea came from that the UK was 'number one'.

In regards to CR, you would expect the Czech republic to do worse than the UK. They have an older population, somewhat poor state, and a horrible vaccination rate (63%).

The continuing perception also probably comes down to the personality of Boris Johnson. You can't go around shaking hands, calling it 'kung flu', party through the lockdowns, then expect people to see you as an ideal leader in an emergency situation.

> Well, that's the other thing: there was a time when the UK did have top-tier per-capita death rates, so that's where the idea came from that the UK was 'number one'.

I fully agree with this.

> In regards to CR, you would expect the Czech republic to do worse than the UK. They have an older population, somewhat poor state, and a horrible vaccination rate (63%).

But not this.

The Czech Republic began to handle Covid badly before vaccination was even possible; it's not sensible to blame their low vaccination rates for their troubles.

You only have to look at the speed with which things went wrong in Autumn 2020 (and the fact that their early autumn death rate peak was as bad as their mid-winter death rate peak, unlike most countries with mitigations in place) to see that their problem was fundamentally that they had failed to act politically in the quieter summer months; complacency is the issue.

This was pretty widely reported-on in the media at the time; people were very surprised at how the mask-wearing success story had messed it up so badly.

By that time even the UK was culturally better prepared for accepting restrictions; our autumn wave was considerably blunted by them.

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