he did not have it. he claimed he had it, not his doctor.
One of the running twitter jokes, started by a famous comedian over there, is asking for the health minister, now that he was fired, to release the real result for the president's covid19 test.
I don't understand the Sweden example. Their daily % increase in deaths is well below California. I don't know if there is a difference in counting deaths but Sweden seems to be doing ok relative to other countries. I have heard that they are effectively shut down voluntarily, so government action was not needed but the effect has been the same. Maybe a Swede can weigh in.
Swede here. Like you say our isolation is pretty much volountary, with only larger groups gathering being banned - though I very much doubt that would happen anyway should it be allowed. Our neighboring countries who opted for total lockdown are slowly starting to open up too. I think the death toll in pretty much any country will be primarily depending on how well you’ve protected your elderly. We’ve done OK but could certainly have done better. Though still very far from the “devastatingly wrong” claim above.
I definitely want to know. But it seems like Swedish public policy is that the current measures are the strictest sustainable ones, so they're going to maintain them until strict measures are no longer needed. It's not clear that early visibility of a spike would change that.
Given that mortality rate is closely tied to the availability of ventilators, it would be catastrophically short sighted to not react to a spike with strong, short term measures.
I guess I'm not sure what to say in response to that. Swedish officials simply don't agree that strong short term measures are required to ensure a sufficient number of ventilators.
This turns out not to be the case. Ventilators don't actually help much with COVID-19. If you end up severe enough to not be able to breathe on your own you're likely to die, and the ventilator only prolongs it. So running out of ventilators won't actually cause many more deaths.
The way to prevent a lot of deaths is simply to prevent people from catching it at all.
Most recent numbers I've seen are that if you go on a vent, you've got a 70% (San Fransisco) to 90% (New Orleans) chance of dying. Not great.
Anecdotal word from family members working in ERs is that none of them have been on a shift with a successful code run on a covid patient. CPR is low single digits 30-day survival based on Chinese numbers released this week. It was something like (1) patient survived out of 37 attempts.
The question of if the 10-30% of vent survivors would have survived without a vent is fair, but that's a maximum efficacy at this point.
Vents are definitely not the answer everyone thought they would be.
Yeah, I started to go there earlier, but stopped myself.
Doctors seem to be doing a better job of informing patients (or families) of those issues before intubating, especially if they have multiple risk factors, and a surprising number of cases have opted not to vent.
But also:
1) There are quite a few really sad stories of patients getting dropped at the ED curb by a spouse as if they'll get checked out and be right back out to go home, only to be immediately intubated and sedated, and ultimately dying without family by their side and no chance to say goodbyes.
They now make a lot of effort to make phone calls or video chats to family before intubating anyone, but it's still rough without anyone being able to be there, and then not being able to speak either. And it just adds to the weight of what the nurses have to deal with, emotionally.
2)There's also the murky topic of straining hospital resources. You obviously don't know ahead of time who the 10-30% of survivors will be and you want to save whoever you can, and hopefully we never get to the point of true rationing. But...
It's hard to be blind to the fact that it's a huge amount of risk, resources, and physical & emotional effort that are seeing relatively little success. I don't have an answer. Hopefully we get better at it.
10-30% survival odds are much better than 0, and the negative consequences of being ventilated depends on the ventilator settings; more time is worse, but it also varies by the ventilator pressure.
Germany is seeing better results by ventilating earlier, FYI.
Some of the folks on vents would have survived anyway. Probably fewer than survive with.
But I don't know, severe permanent lung damage guaranteed, delirium and dementia likely, and the misery of the treatment itself, all for a 1-in-5 chance of surviving (where survival is measured only at 30 days)?
I'm not saying nobody should be allowed to make that choice -- they should -- but I don't know that I would.
Every developed country did testing and contact tracing, even the ones popularly seen as doing nothing. That was why leaders were saying it wouldn't be a problem in February; they didn't expect a magic cure, they expected their testing and contact tracing to handle it.
If you're not testing a sizeable enough sample of the population, then whatever number of cases you give has to be taken with a rather large helping of salt.
For example, my country's CDC has the official number of confirmed cases in the low hundreds with a dozen deaths, but anyone wise enough knows that between the ridiculously low number of samples tested (less than ten thousand in a population of a couple hundred million), the poor public health infrastructure, the anaemic government response and general public health illiteracy, the real number of cases is easily an order of magnitude or two higher.
Completely agreed. Sweden is worth observing in terms of number of deaths and how overloaded their hospitals get. But their number of cases, like in a lot of countries, is essentially garbage data that can't possibly help our understanding of the situation to consume.
If your hospitals aren't overrun, and you don't expect them to become overrun in the future, improving your estimate of infection rates doesn't seem like a high-leverage activity. The argument for doing a lot of testing is that it enables good contact tracing, which Sweden doesn't seem to be planning to do anymore.
Every strategy is dependent on testing, because every strategy requires an accurate assessment of sickness rates. If you don't know the extent of the problem, how can you even formulate a plan to fight it?
If by "strategy" you mean herd immunity, Sweden isn't doing that. No one is publicly claiming to be trying that anymore.
You can call it herd immunity or not, and Sweden has indeed picked "not". But their plan is to keep doing what they're currently doing. The Swedish government has no phase 2 where they expect to contain the coronavirus more strongly.
It's in the major league of deaths/million pop (along with the UK, US).
I have to say, as someone usually loathes my generally scientifically-blinkered federal government (Aus), it's relaxing and pleasant to be able to think quite well of them for once. Australia at this stage seems almost like a case study in how to handle a pandemic like this intelligently. Time will tell, of course.
Sweden is at 118 deaths per million vs 53 per million in Denmark or 94.5 in the US
Australia is at 2.52 per million
Sweden has a population of something like 10 million while the greater Sydney area alone has a population of 5.98 million so population density isn't the reason why Sweden has so many more deaths.
Voluntary lockdown means that some people still stand too close at the supermarkets, still plenty of people socialising around my area as normal & different companies apparently have different ideas when it comes to work from home policies
To be fair many countries are locked down as much as Australia and are also doing worse so I'm not sure what it is that is working so well there.
They aren't testing. I have 3 friends bedridden right now with COVID19 symptoms in Stockholm, all of which were denied a test after they asked for one. They were told to stay home and get over it.
To be fair, that's a lot of places right now. I have a neighbour (Kitchener, Canada) who had all the symptoms and wasn't tested— all they wanted to hear is that her house had an area with a separate bathroom where she'd be able to isolate from the rest of her family. She recovered on her own without medical intervention.
True but I didn't say otherwise. Sweden is failing at the only thing that can begin to mount a successful response to COVID19 which is widespread testing.
Sweden has 1/4th the population of California. It looks like the total deaths is around 50% higher than California although of course California might have deaths that should have been attributed to COVID-19 that weren’t.
It looks like it was estimated to have arrived in Sweden two days earlier.
The SF Bay Area has a population that is 75% of Sweden’s entire population.
SF itself is more densely populated than Sweden’s most densely populated city which appears to be Stockholm (7700/km^2 vs 5000/km^2). Stockholm has a population around 20% larger than SF.
According to Wikipedia, California is smaller than Sweden.
So there may be some dense pockets in Sweden but it certainly isn’t more densely populated than California and it doesn’t appear that there are large cities that approach the density of NYC/SF.
Normalizing daily deaths to population, Sweden is doing worse than California. Both are doing much better that Lombardy or NY. Somewhat encouraging, the # of daily deaths is decreasing across the board. Possibly a mix between [voluntary] lockdown effects and better palliative treatments.
Far too early to say this is "devastatingly wrong." The number under the curve matters more than random spikes (that don't oversaturate the health system, BTW).
Moscow and most of the other places in Russia are on a complete lockdown for more than a week now - much stricter that eg. NY or California. I’m not sure what do you mean by your comment.
I think if you read the article I linked to you can see what I mean. They were forbidding medical staff from doing tests and treatments!
...
In an interview with CBC News on Monday, Dr. Rimma Kamalova, who heads the hospital's rheumatology department and is quarantined in the facility, said when the outbreak started, regional health authorities refused to test patients for coronavirus.
"According to our policies ... we could not do testing on coronavirus," she said.
"We had orders, at that time, not to give this diagnosis and take the relevant [mitigation] measures."
...
The number of cases China is reporting in travelers arriving from Russia strongly suggests that Russia is significantly underreporting the scope of its outbreak.
You have it backwards. If your positivity rate continues to plummet as testing ramps up it points to the inverse. See other nations with wide spread testing and low positivity rates, namely Australia, NZ, Taiwan, UAE.
This is exactly why I don't understand where people are getting the idea Russia is doing a good job of managing this!
That looks like a lot of things, but it sure as heck doesn't look like a lockdown, certainly doesn't look like one that is going to be anywhere near as effective as the lockdowns in other jurisdictions. Crowding like that is absurd.
Add to that the fact that they share a large border with China and were pretending to have no cases for at least a solid month or so. As the article I linked to stated, they have even given up on the propaganda effort at this point. Even the authorities in Russia whose specialty is self-deception know which way this is headed now!
Does it make any difference one way or the other? If the response is vital, then some country will get it "devastatingly wrong", and then won't that produce a new wave after a bit everywhere else?
Won't that just be a sequel to the first cycle, where things seemed under control, it was downplayed, and then it got going outside of China. Why should anyone expect other than a fractal replay?
Temperature might or might not help [1] and even if it does it may not be enough. Daily confirmed cases are still rising but effects of the quarantine should be visible soon since i think we are reaching the 3 weeks mark.
Your link is irrelevant to SARS-CoV-2. Did you mean to post a different one?
The paper you link to discusses attenuation of influenza A at 39.5 ºC, which is pretty far above useful environmental temperatures (you'd just trade off viral deaths with heatwave-associated deaths), not to mention it's an entirely different virus.
The parallels between the current US and Brazilian administrations are hard to ignore. That said, I really hope Trump and Fauci are able to see this crisis out together. Bolsonaro’s decision today could kill thousands, no doubt.
Keep in mind the lockdown is meant to slow spread so the healthcare system doesn't get overloaded, not to stop it.
It is successful in this respect, and IMO a healthy balance of economic slowdown and death toll. We'll probably start reopening (hopefully in stages, so we can monitor impact) in the next ~3 weeks.
What's your scenario for people starving? Congress refuses to give out more money? Workers in "essential" businesses (which includes everything food related) stop working?
Rent in some Brazilian cities has been massively lifted, specially for the elderly.
Regarding starvation, I don’t see it happening because people is starting to steal, shoplift, local stores. I saw it in front of me last weekend. And they use minors to steal, so nobody goes to jail. I live in São Paulo.
Earlier in the year it was this was a bad flu, no cause for alarm, no lockdown necessary.
This has switched to the virus being too contagious to contain so you might as well do nothing major to address it and let it run its course.
Truth is countries that took this seriously and acted swiftly controlled it. They’ll be reopening soon (Singapore already has, right?). I’m guessing the US will probably start lifting in May. Trump can huff and puff all he wants but so much of the US economy is tied up in about 10 states so they ultimately call the shots... and they’re keeping the quarantine through the month.
Nope. Singapore “locked down” 10 days ago shutting down all schools and non-essential services in what the government has been calling a “circuit breaker”, and the locals have been playfully shortening to “CB”, the short-form of the local Hokkien colloquialism referring to a woman’s genitals. Despite this the number of daily new cases keeps rising and today’s numbers are a new high (again).
You’ve managed to completely ignore why we had a lock down; it’s not about preventing total infections, although that would be nice, it’s about preventing a spike of infections that overwhelms the medical system.
I don't follow. I'm not ignoring that. We locked down to prevent a spike, and in many places the spike has been successfully prevented, so those places are now figuring out how to open up. Some people say that this is irresponsible - that nobody should open up until the coronavirus can be eradicated - but this isn't realistic and isn't what public health officials think should happen.
There’s absolutely no guarantee that the economy will make a quick recovery if the lockdowns are lifted.
If the death toll starts to spike, people are going to stay home anyway, and businesses will be bleeding cash hoping for a recovery that isn’t coming quickly enough.
At this moment, full recovery is expected to happen no sooner than December 2022. Small business already bled out. If governors extend the lockout for another month, it will make it pointless to go back to work, as there will be no work to go back to. People will stay home until something else happens.
"Something else" being not necessarily external, much less staying passive. Example: post-WWII Germany. People rebuild everything from scratch by goverment just not being an obstacle to them.
I wouldn't say the government being much of an obstacle here, but the union as a whole. It represents ~60% of the Brazilian GDP. So even before rebuilding the country, people we'll need to keep collecting taxes to keep this huge public engine running. It won't be easy.
Honest question: Did we see any anormal mortality in any country caused by the covid-19? Countrywide there seems to be less death than usual on the period January-March in Europe.
Edit: And here goes my karma. I will need to do some PR to catch up with this :)
The numbers may be similar, if not slightly higher than normal, because the deaths we'd normally have are being offset by reduced activity and increase COVID-19 deaths. So looking at totals without that context doesn't help much.
Europe's seen abnormally high mortality rates starting at the end of March. Someone sent me this graph, although unfortunately I didn't keep track of the source:
How are we sure about this? We cannot anymore but are we sure that the lockdown will lower the global mortality? Why are we not acting rationally anymore? Are we sure that fear did not take over and now we just do as everybody because nobody ever got fired for choosing the lockdown?
I mean, if you just google "covid death tolls" you'll see 34,386 deaths in USA alone that we know of. Considering a lot of COVID patients don't even get diagnosed the real number is likely higher. Isn't that enough?
Yes, but this is my point, what if the peak just shifted this year. All the people that might have died because of the flu are now dying from COVID-19. People looking back at the data in 100 years won't probably notice that there was an epidemic.
If nothing else, the virus is more effective at spreading than common influenzas so people who would have never gotten the flu, are getting Covid and dying from it.
In the Netherlands (for March) mortality for all age cohorts is up, average of about 10%. Lower cohorts mortality is down but not enough to offset the others. Causality is by definition impossible to ascertain at this aggregate level, but no reasonable person would come with another explanation.
Yes, the numbers I am quoting are as compared to other years, adjusted for macro changes in population makeup, etc. The gold standard for reporting on this.
It's important to look at the numbers by region and not the total numbers. And if you consider the overall mortality you have to take in mind that other incidents where people usually die went down (e.g. traffic accidents.
But all these countries have now strict lockdown measures in place.
I'm sure that the death toll im Brazil will skyrocket.
That reminds me of another headline from last month that was right up the Monty Python alley too: ”Turkmenistan Has Banned Use Of The Word ‘Coronavirus’”
As a friend who’s a standup comedian said in response to reading that: “Brilliant, why didn’t our government think of this? We wouldn’t have all these problems.”
Recall that the US President wanted to keep a cruise ship from docking because "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault". If your career is built on the principle that perception trumps reality, it's hard to adjust when reality doesn't cooperate.
That's literally the case with 'climate change' being banned from government discussions and reports in the federal govt in the US and in various states.
Bolsonaro has no negotiation skills, and is (frankly) bad at mostly everything, but he's got a good finance minister who's saying that the country just can't stop creating value, but what is the right balance?
Mandetta, the previous health minister, had no flexibility in his views, he wanted to follow the WHO blindly, without weighing anything else.
Maybe the new guy has the flexibility and the brains to find a better balance of views, and to create a strategy on top of it.
It’s not the job of the health minister to consider the economy. If they’re thinking about that, they’re being an awful health minister.
It’s the job of the executive to balance between the different paths recommended by different advisors, and chart a path that has the correct balance of trade offs.
It's the job of the health minister to give his boss useful policy options to choose from and that requires some level of understanding and accommodating the other variables that the boss has to consider. That means that the health minister has to consider the economy and the economy minister has to consider public health.
I don't know much about this guy but if he was as bad at balancing the variables he had to consider as the GP suggests then I can see why he was removed.
The former health minister was considering the economy and had speaked public a few times about it. He recommendations were based in the fact that the government couldn't simply switch from a horizontal isolation to a non planned vertical isolation. He main responsibility (at least the short term one) was to not overload the hospitals and put the health professionals in risk, and at least that he has achieved.
On the other hand, the president wants a "vertical" isolation without a plan, he simply wants to "reopen the economy" (whatever it means). Remembering that he has largely underplayed the issue, calling it "just a little flu" (probably it would be better translated to: "just a cold").
Brazil doesn't have enough tests to make good decisions about which areas should be in a horizontal isolation or to be instead in a vertical one.
The former health minister was clear that all the information coming from his office should be backed by science (and this alone was bugging the president a lot for some reason). This also meant that he, as the health minister, couldn't go public and say that a specific medication was effective to treat the covid-19 just because some tests worked in vitro (any doctor or scientist knows that this alone doesn't mean that it'll work efficiently in vivo).
The president behaviour was the opposite, many times he went public to say that a drug tested in vitro was enough to have the horizontal isolation lifted out. And as a consequence or his irresponsible pronouncements, many of his followers ran to the drug stores to buy certain medications, leaving people that really need them for other diseases without medication.
So the main issue turned out to be the fact that the former health minister was becoming popular because of his common sense, and everyone knows that in the eyes of a populist, "there can be only one".
It's not that simple in cases where our immune system can also act as the villain [1][2].
We sure can act like irrational animals and play the natural selection card (and leave people to die an excruciating death), but I personally prefer to slow down the almost inevitable [3], so our health system has more time to cope with the situation as well as they can.
Yes and no. As a sibling pointed out, for some viruses it’s your own immune system that kills you.
Also being athletic doesn’t really confer a magic boost to your immune system that overcomes age. It’s better than being obese and out of shape, but it isn’t going to magically restore your immune system to that of a 20 year old.
Also, having seen videos of Bolsonaro doing “push-ups”, I’d say that formerly athletic is closer to the mark.
The Brazilian supreme court already decided that state governors and city mayors can impose regional lockdowns. Most cities are already with restrictive measures and this event is not going to change that.
It is hard to predict the future, but despite the former Health minister indeed have being fired for clashing with Bolsonaro views, there is not much indication that the policy will in fact change now.
It became a ego dispute in the last days, but original rumors that the role would be occupied by someone without health expertise that would follow Bolsonaro orders to the letter were wrong. The new minister is also a doctor who hinted that lockdown is necessary before.
I believe Bolsonaro leadership is a disaster and more people will die because of his actions and speeches. I just don't think today's announcement will change much. It will not get worse.
The governors here don't have that much autonomy as in the US, but they have enough to define what will indeed happen in the streets. This won't change with the new minister.
He's a total madman.
Trump is a shithead but he'll read the situation or be advised by someone, jump ships and blame it on the chinese or something.
This guy went 100% on this and is not turning back, to the level of taking people to the streets to force business owners to open, walking on the streets to chat with followers (while he's suspected positive covid) and calling for fasting and prayers as a solution. BTW Religious services were defined as "essential" so they can still be carried on. Much of his base is from a fanatic/fringe christian faith so maybe that's were that comes from.
What worries me is that now Brazil is in a stand off, the military that surround him, vice-president included, have cutted him off power and congress is starting to look into an impeachment. But even if they do, and do away with Bolsonaro, then the military that ran with him will have the power, will finally declare the lockdown and anything can happen next, they'll be lucky if they have elections after that. Police abuse during lockdown grew a lot in other latin countries, i expect at least the same to happen there, who knows to which level.
126 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 406 ms ] threadPerhaps Boris Johnson's attitude will change a little bit now, for example.
One of the running twitter jokes, started by a famous comedian over there, is asking for the health minister, now that he was fired, to release the real result for the president's covid19 test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_C...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in...
https://www.thelocal.se/20200414/understanding-swedens-figur...
The way to prevent a lot of deaths is simply to prevent people from catching it at all.
Anecdotal word from family members working in ERs is that none of them have been on a shift with a successful code run on a covid patient. CPR is low single digits 30-day survival based on Chinese numbers released this week. It was something like (1) patient survived out of 37 attempts.
The question of if the 10-30% of vent survivors would have survived without a vent is fair, but that's a maximum efficacy at this point.
Vents are definitely not the answer everyone thought they would be.
Doctors seem to be doing a better job of informing patients (or families) of those issues before intubating, especially if they have multiple risk factors, and a surprising number of cases have opted not to vent.
But also:
1) There are quite a few really sad stories of patients getting dropped at the ED curb by a spouse as if they'll get checked out and be right back out to go home, only to be immediately intubated and sedated, and ultimately dying without family by their side and no chance to say goodbyes.
They now make a lot of effort to make phone calls or video chats to family before intubating anyone, but it's still rough without anyone being able to be there, and then not being able to speak either. And it just adds to the weight of what the nurses have to deal with, emotionally.
2)There's also the murky topic of straining hospital resources. You obviously don't know ahead of time who the 10-30% of survivors will be and you want to save whoever you can, and hopefully we never get to the point of true rationing. But...
It's hard to be blind to the fact that it's a huge amount of risk, resources, and physical & emotional effort that are seeing relatively little success. I don't have an answer. Hopefully we get better at it.
Germany is seeing better results by ventilating earlier, FYI.
But I don't know, severe permanent lung damage guaranteed, delirium and dementia likely, and the misery of the treatment itself, all for a 1-in-5 chance of surviving (where survival is measured only at 30 days)?
I'm not saying nobody should be allowed to make that choice -- they should -- but I don't know that I would.
For example, my country's CDC has the official number of confirmed cases in the low hundreds with a dozen deaths, but anyone wise enough knows that between the ridiculously low number of samples tested (less than ten thousand in a population of a couple hundred million), the poor public health infrastructure, the anaemic government response and general public health illiteracy, the real number of cases is easily an order of magnitude or two higher.
Are you suggesting that as long as your hospitals aren't overrun, inflection rates aren't worth knowing ?
If by "strategy" you mean herd immunity, Sweden isn't doing that. No one is publicly claiming to be trying that anymore.
I have to say, as someone usually loathes my generally scientifically-blinkered federal government (Aus), it's relaxing and pleasant to be able to think quite well of them for once. Australia at this stage seems almost like a case study in how to handle a pandemic like this intelligently. Time will tell, of course.
Sweden is at 118 deaths per million vs 53 per million in Denmark or 94.5 in the US
Australia is at 2.52 per million
Sweden has a population of something like 10 million while the greater Sydney area alone has a population of 5.98 million so population density isn't the reason why Sweden has so many more deaths.
Voluntary lockdown means that some people still stand too close at the supermarkets, still plenty of people socialising around my area as normal & different companies apparently have different ideas when it comes to work from home policies
To be fair many countries are locked down as much as Australia and are also doing worse so I'm not sure what it is that is working so well there.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
Their numbers aren't reflective of reality.
Same as the US and Canada I suppose.
It looks like it was estimated to have arrived in Sweden two days earlier.
SF itself is more densely populated than Sweden’s most densely populated city which appears to be Stockholm (7700/km^2 vs 5000/km^2). Stockholm has a population around 20% larger than SF.
According to Wikipedia, California is smaller than Sweden.
So there may be some dense pockets in Sweden but it certainly isn’t more densely populated than California and it doesn’t appear that there are large cities that approach the density of NYC/SF.
https://covid19.quersive.com/chart?c=M&e=SE&e=US-CA&e=US-NY&...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/covid-19-russia-spike-cases-1....
... In an interview with CBC News on Monday, Dr. Rimma Kamalova, who heads the hospital's rheumatology department and is quarantined in the facility, said when the outbreak started, regional health authorities refused to test patients for coronavirus.
"According to our policies ... we could not do testing on coronavirus," she said.
"We had orders, at that time, not to give this diagnosis and take the relevant [mitigation] measures." ...
If you are getting less than that, you aren't testing enough people. ALso if your number is far higher you might be only testing dire cases.
https://varlamov.ru/3860702.html
That looks like a lot of things, but it sure as heck doesn't look like a lockdown, certainly doesn't look like one that is going to be anywhere near as effective as the lockdowns in other jurisdictions. Crowding like that is absurd.
Add to that the fact that they share a large border with China and were pretending to have no cases for at least a solid month or so. As the article I linked to stated, they have even given up on the propaganda effort at this point. Even the authorities in Russia whose specialty is self-deception know which way this is headed now!
Won't that just be a sequel to the first cycle, where things seemed under control, it was downplayed, and then it got going outside of China. Why should anyone expect other than a fractal replay?
There are other factors involved in producing a higher mortality, like comorbidity and demographics.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25855727
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3079831/coro...
The paper you link to discusses attenuation of influenza A at 39.5 ºC, which is pretty far above useful environmental temperatures (you'd just trade off viral deaths with heatwave-associated deaths), not to mention it's an entirely different virus.
Corona virus is so contagious and we're so unprepared that it will continue to spread in the US regardless of what we do.
Yes, thousands will die regardless of what we do.
But there is no way lockdown will continue until people starve. So end this timid lockdown before the total destruction of our economy.
Start thinking about public policy instead of "my dear 80 year-old grandpa in the home."
It is successful in this respect, and IMO a healthy balance of economic slowdown and death toll. We'll probably start reopening (hopefully in stages, so we can monitor impact) in the next ~3 weeks.
I would be more worried about rent and mortgages.
Regarding starvation, I don’t see it happening because people is starting to steal, shoplift, local stores. I saw it in front of me last weekend. And they use minors to steal, so nobody goes to jail. I live in São Paulo.
Earlier in the year it was this was a bad flu, no cause for alarm, no lockdown necessary.
This has switched to the virus being too contagious to contain so you might as well do nothing major to address it and let it run its course.
Truth is countries that took this seriously and acted swiftly controlled it. They’ll be reopening soon (Singapore already has, right?). I’m guessing the US will probably start lifting in May. Trump can huff and puff all he wants but so much of the US economy is tied up in about 10 states so they ultimately call the shots... and they’re keeping the quarantine through the month.
Nope. Singapore “locked down” 10 days ago shutting down all schools and non-essential services in what the government has been calling a “circuit breaker”, and the locals have been playfully shortening to “CB”, the short-form of the local Hokkien colloquialism referring to a woman’s genitals. Despite this the number of daily new cases keeps rising and today’s numbers are a new high (again).
If the death toll starts to spike, people are going to stay home anyway, and businesses will be bleeding cash hoping for a recovery that isn’t coming quickly enough.
Edit: And here goes my karma. I will need to do some PR to catch up with this :)
It's the same in the US. Article here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronaviru...
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-nq9Tcrho5QQ/XpjnH7DgeRI/A...
The CDC claims[1] influenza caused 61,000 and 34,157 in 2017-18 and 2018-19 respectively, in the USA.
My guess is, without social / travel restrictions COVID-19 could potentially kill a lot more?
I don't envy politicians right now. Proposing politicians act based on how many would have died anyway must be a bit uncomfortable for them.
Mess situation.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
About the only country significantly under normal is Ireland, which has a youngish population and a fairly effective lockdown.
The good news is that it seems to be starting to fall in most countries.
https://www.rivm.nl/documenten/epidemiologische-situatie-cov...
You can see that there are approximately 1500 more deaths per week and there is no peak visible.
https://www.lavocedinewyork.com/en/news/2020/03/26/coronavir...
It's important to look at the numbers by region and not the total numbers. And if you consider the overall mortality you have to take in mind that other incidents where people usually die went down (e.g. traffic accidents. But all these countries have now strict lockdown measures in place.
I'm sure that the death toll im Brazil will skyrocket.
As a friend who’s a standup comedian said in response to reading that: “Brilliant, why didn’t our government think of this? We wouldn’t have all these problems.”
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/08/trump-...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2015/03/09/florida-bans...
Mandetta, the previous health minister, had no flexibility in his views, he wanted to follow the WHO blindly, without weighing anything else.
Maybe the new guy has the flexibility and the brains to find a better balance of views, and to create a strategy on top of it.
It’s the job of the executive to balance between the different paths recommended by different advisors, and chart a path that has the correct balance of trade offs.
I don't know much about this guy but if he was as bad at balancing the variables he had to consider as the GP suggests then I can see why he was removed.
On the other hand, the president wants a "vertical" isolation without a plan, he simply wants to "reopen the economy" (whatever it means). Remembering that he has largely underplayed the issue, calling it "just a little flu" (probably it would be better translated to: "just a cold").
Brazil doesn't have enough tests to make good decisions about which areas should be in a horizontal isolation or to be instead in a vertical one.
The former health minister was clear that all the information coming from his office should be backed by science (and this alone was bugging the president a lot for some reason). This also meant that he, as the health minister, couldn't go public and say that a specific medication was effective to treat the covid-19 just because some tests worked in vitro (any doctor or scientist knows that this alone doesn't mean that it'll work efficiently in vivo).
The president behaviour was the opposite, many times he went public to say that a drug tested in vitro was enough to have the horizontal isolation lifted out. And as a consequence or his irresponsible pronouncements, many of his followers ran to the drug stores to buy certain medications, leaving people that really need them for other diseases without medication.
So the main issue turned out to be the fact that the former health minister was becoming popular because of his common sense, and everyone knows that in the eyes of a populist, "there can be only one".
Wish I was kidding.
We sure can act like irrational animals and play the natural selection card (and leave people to die an excruciating death), but I personally prefer to slow down the almost inevitable [3], so our health system has more time to cope with the situation as well as they can.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/07/8280914...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/11/science/how-c...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/coronavir...
Also being athletic doesn’t really confer a magic boost to your immune system that overcomes age. It’s better than being obese and out of shape, but it isn’t going to magically restore your immune system to that of a 20 year old.
Also, having seen videos of Bolsonaro doing “push-ups”, I’d say that formerly athletic is closer to the mark.
It became a ego dispute in the last days, but original rumors that the role would be occupied by someone without health expertise that would follow Bolsonaro orders to the letter were wrong. The new minister is also a doctor who hinted that lockdown is necessary before.
I believe Bolsonaro leadership is a disaster and more people will die because of his actions and speeches. I just don't think today's announcement will change much. It will not get worse.
The governors here don't have that much autonomy as in the US, but they have enough to define what will indeed happen in the streets. This won't change with the new minister.
What worries me is that now Brazil is in a stand off, the military that surround him, vice-president included, have cutted him off power and congress is starting to look into an impeachment. But even if they do, and do away with Bolsonaro, then the military that ran with him will have the power, will finally declare the lockdown and anything can happen next, they'll be lucky if they have elections after that. Police abuse during lockdown grew a lot in other latin countries, i expect at least the same to happen there, who knows to which level.