If I were to guess, Norway has a large number of cases because they've been very good about performing tests. The cat's out of the bag already, so at this point it's mostly about figuring out how to contain and help people recover.
More likely because there is a week-long winter school holiday in the latter part of February, and many people went to skiing resorts in Switzerland and Austria, transferring through airports in Italy. Those that did are generally young and in good health, so there hasn't been any fatalities yet. In the beginning, all cases could be traced to someone who had been travelling. Now we have internal proliferation, and the largest cities have ordered social distancing/partial lock-down (cancelling of events, closing of schools).
Hueibei (Chinese province) is at 1145 cases per million people according to the WHO stats from yesterday... Italy/South Korea/Norway are all bad, but very far from worst case.
Like brenden2 said, what is being measured is the number of tests performed. If a country looks away, its number will be low. It will show in a few months though.
You can see how some places like US are not treating this like a threat. We Italians have a high number of cases because of the number of tests, same thing for South Korea for example.
I am paranoid about the testing. Indian government doesn't seem to be handling this as well as the media or official report says. There is no mention of tourists from china/itlay present in my town a few days ago and taken away by the authorities after someone complaint.
Total number of tests are too low when you factor in the population size. The airport measures were initially blanket statements and people were coming home without any tests that should have been done at the airport. The healthcare system is already jammed and there is an unusual amount of unidentified deaths (pneumonia deaths increased locally).
Testing facilities are lacking. Even though, there should be 53 facilities across country. Most of the tests are sent to a few only especially pune which makes me wonder if that's also just a useless number.
People are bathing in cow dung, drinking cow urine, selling herbal tea, politicians and health officers even repeating the same. Holi was supposed to be banned but here, locally THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN but in newspaper, it wasall over that it did. Weddings, large gatherings are still happening. No one is taking any precautions. Convincing my family to do anything gets me yelling because they won't listen.
And given the history of Indian government tackling such issues, I feel even more worried. Most statistics for deaths are severely underreported and for this, they will underreport the underreported. There is also swine and bird flu to deal with.
I am surprised there is no internet ban to curb the "panic".
10 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadThe initial papers coming out of China indicate that the infection is asymptomatic or mild in a lot of patients.
We can assume a very significant amounts of undiagnosed patients everywhere.
Wikipedia has a good collection of reported numbers [1].
Norway seems to indeed be one of the most aggressive in testing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing
You can see how some places like US are not treating this like a threat. We Italians have a high number of cases because of the number of tests, same thing for South Korea for example.
Total number of tests are too low when you factor in the population size. The airport measures were initially blanket statements and people were coming home without any tests that should have been done at the airport. The healthcare system is already jammed and there is an unusual amount of unidentified deaths (pneumonia deaths increased locally).
Testing facilities are lacking. Even though, there should be 53 facilities across country. Most of the tests are sent to a few only especially pune which makes me wonder if that's also just a useless number.
People are bathing in cow dung, drinking cow urine, selling herbal tea, politicians and health officers even repeating the same. Holi was supposed to be banned but here, locally THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN but in newspaper, it wasall over that it did. Weddings, large gatherings are still happening. No one is taking any precautions. Convincing my family to do anything gets me yelling because they won't listen.
And given the history of Indian government tackling such issues, I feel even more worried. Most statistics for deaths are severely underreported and for this, they will underreport the underreported. There is also swine and bird flu to deal with.
I am surprised there is no internet ban to curb the "panic".
0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/09/hindu-nationalists-magi...
1] https://youtu.be/_QzKbMF7Kz0
2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6022378/