It won't happen, because there's no political incentive to do so.
The citizens of these beleaguered countries seem quite happy with the government management thus far[1]. I honestly don't know how anyone can look at the UK response thus far and think - more of that please!
The UK is faced with a lack of choice here. My read is that people strongly dislike the current government policies but believe that the cons are "least worst".
There's been very little in the way of real opposition, sadly. For instance, when the Tories do make actual fuckups Labour usually resort to off-topic complaints about idpol so the Tories just do whatever they want with no push back.
The main issue is a voting system that only allows two parties to compete and makes parties between fractious groups of people with very different views. The Tories for whatever reason are just far better at aligning most of their party to the goal of winning.
The two-party system is bad, but I do believe Labour are responsible for making themselves unelectable. The last general election they were running some of the most disliked front-benchers in politics: McDonnell, Corbyn and Abbott, as well as making it very clear they were anti-Brexit.
(I'm from the North, this is the general sentiment in my local community. More stringent lockdown policy is also incredibly unpopular here.)
I agree, but it also doesn't help when the Labour opposition have had a string of weak opposition leaders.
Even Keir Starmer seems content to sit back and only critise the Government's response the day or days after a grim milestone/but of news.
Why isn't he constantly saying that the UK should totally shut their borders, for example? He should be saying this and nothing else, and directing the rest of Labour to do the same. That's how an effective opposition works.
I have to say I've been really disappointed in KS - I wanted him to win the leadership, and was expecting a much more robust performance from him. I wouldn't say he chooses silence, but he often sounds a bit whiny and little more.
As already said by someone else, I don't think that's the right reading of it. I know it's anecdotal, but I don't know anyone here (I'm in the southern UK) who thinks that the government has handled this even remotely competently, but they also acknowledge that there's not really an ideal way to handle it. The only thing that seems to be going 'to plan' is the vaccine rollout, which has surprised me as I never thought they'd get near the target figures they now look to be going to achieve (i.e. vaccinating the four key groups by Feb 15).
You have to make some sacrifices to win the battle, but it seems we've paid a lot of the price (in terms of economic costs as well as deaths), but without the positives that should have come from that. As soon as there's any sign of let-up in any of the statistics, it seems the government wants to remove the measures, which seems to be a bad idea to me, but I'm a chump who's not making the decisions!
The UK response has been mediocre rather than awful.
* PPE sourcing has been poor.
* Track and trace has been poor, and for the money they spent should have been far better.
* Lockdowns have been too leaky, and too late.
* But the vaccination research and rollout has been excellent.
The high UK death toll is only partly due to the above mediocrities, and mainly due to factors that cannot be pinned on the government:
* A very highly internationally mobile population that seeded infections everywhere in the country.
* A very highly internally mobile population that spread infections everywhere in the country.
* A very high density population
* Little experience of pandemic management and limited pre-existing testing capacity
* No culture of mask wearing
* A higher than average aged population
* A higher than average obese population
* Higher percentage of ethnic minority individuals who have been more susceptible to the disease, even after adjusting for health and income inequalities.
* More northerly climate with colder temperatures and higher rates of vitamin D deficiency
* Lower public tolerance for restrictions on movement
* Insufficient police numbers to enforce lockdown policies
No SINGLE cause from the lists above explain the UK's high death rate. It's a perfect storm of all of them.
how the efficacy of vaccines changes with mutating strains of the virus is I think still out in the open, but I'll second the general tone of the article. Complacency is dangerous. Already are there people who treat the vaccinations themselves as panacea despite the fact that in some countries like the US almost half of all frontline workers aren't even willing to be vaccinated.[1]
The pandemic will not magically end because of a miracle cure, but with enough state capacity and social coordination crushing the thing would be possible right now.
I don’t know but before COVID I used to get a flu shot each year. This year wasn’t as important as 1) restrictions also decimated the flu, 2) my country used up all the shots it ordered (which never happens) before I had time to get one myself.
So that's whats causing people to believe it's a fraud? How does policy packing counter all the people that have died and/or gotten sick from COVID-19?
I don't actually know any such people, nor do most of the people I have asked this question. I have yet to know anyone for whom the pandemic is personal in any way.
So I think the death toll is just an abstraction to many. Others believe that there is no change in deaths and the government is just re-labelling them.
SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic, (fairly) highly infectious endemic respiratory virus. Eradication is literally impossible, and even if we could wave a magic wand and simultaneously eradicate it from all humans on earth, you still need to worry about it jumping back over from any of the many animal species infected with it.
> The selection of infectious diseases for eradication is based on rigorous criteria, as both biological and technical features determine whether a pathogenic organism is (at least potentially) eradicable. The targeted organism must not have a non-human reservoir (or, in the case of animal diseases, the infection reservoir must be an easily identifiable species, as in the case of rinderpest), and/or amplify in the environment. This implies that sufficient information on the life cycle and transmission dynamics is available at the time an eradication initiative is programmed. An efficient and practical intervention (such as a vaccine or antibiotic) must be available to interrupt transmission of the infective agent. Studies of measles in the pre-vaccination era led to the concept of the critical community size, the size of the population below which a pathogen ceases to circulate.[2] The use of vaccination programs before the introduction of an eradication campaign can reduce the susceptible population. The disease to be eradicated should be clearly identifiable, and an accurate diagnostic tool should exist. Economic considerations, as well as societal and political support and commitment, are other crucial factors that determine eradication feasibility.[3][4]
SARS-CoV-2 satisfies none of these pre-conditions (except for having a vaccine now). It is not only unrealistic but actively delusional/deleterious to argue for “COVID zero”. Don’t fall for it.
Remember herd immunity doesn’t mean eradication. The virus stays endemic. Which is fine; over the long run the set of all COVID-19-naive individuals becomes dominated by the very young (infants/toddlers), who have essentially zero risk of COVID-19 mortality.
Viruses generally change to be less deadly and more transmissible. The “new variant” is just more transmissible.
It doesn’t make sense to argue “oh what if this virus magically evolves to hurt children”. You need to propose a theoretical mechanism of action. Otherwise spend your time worrying about flu and tuberculosis which kill far more children than COVID-19.
> over the long run the set of all COVID-19-naive individuals becomes dominated by the very young (infants/toddlers), who have essentially zero risk of COVID-19 mortality.
BTW they generally become less deadly because the less deadly spread faster because they don't kill the host, but this virus has a rather long incubation period, so you can have both. Easy spread and higher death rate.
A lot of things COULD happen. For example, a meteor could hit the earth and wipe out all life. Therefore we should pour ALL resources into space exploration, not medicine.
Yes, please do! I think there is an inflated perception of risk because of the relentless media coverage. Risks are probably still higher than the meteor example, but the point of the example is to call for actual numbers! It's not enough to say "some bad thing COULD happen". Many bad things COULD happen.
Yes, for example ushering in a new totalitarian age is much more likely than a (in children) very mild virus magically becoming super deadly.
I really think you may not have ever read the literature on COVID-19 in children. We should be shouting at the rooftops that kids are safe (and btw transmit less than kids), instead here in California we’ve closed school for a year which will - in children - far surpass the harms of COVID-19 by orders of magnitude.
This is a new disease, we don’t know what is going to happen in the future. There could be chronic consequences we don’t know about yet, for example. The virus could evolve to have much higher mortality next year. By allowing it to become endemic, we are also bequeathing it to all future humans. There is surely a more risk aware scenario between endemicity and total eradication.
China and Vietnam get the virus under control by using centralised quarantines.
I wonder how many people supporting the sentiments of this article would be ok with someone arriving at their doorstep, taking you to a prison basically whether you agree or not, and quaranteening you there for at least 10 days with other covid people. Perhaps they also take your family too, in case they are also infected.
Are you willing to pay that price?
Yes I agree. Canada has a long border but just with one country. So think it’s in a good position. It’s way more difficult for a European country for example.
You obviously don’t live in mainland Europe. I can easily cross borders in a small village, on a field, through a forest. There are no fences. Sometimes you don’t even have a line.
It’s a bit like saying New York should close its borders with Pennsylvania
With closed borders, Canada is basically an island like Australia, NZ and the UK.
Lots of posters here seem convinced that being an island makes it easy to control covid. If thats the most important factor, I'd love to hear some theories on why the numbers in canada aren't coming down to 0, like they have in Australia and NZ?
Key detail here is likely that it should have been done early enough. Once the virus is inside it is very hard to contain. Specially when asymptomatic carrier are common. Chain of them can keep virus alive and spreading for weeks or months.
Yeah its much easier to do before the numbers spike. Some analysis I heard recently said if you do a lockdown, delaying by 1 day at the outset leads to locking down a whole extra week at the other end.
The numbers are coming down (slowly) in Montreal now that they have a strict lockdown. I think the process could work; but at this point it might take so long to get the numbers under control that people wouldn't tolerate it. Especially not when the vaccine feels so close. We'd be talking like, 4 months in a row of strict lockdown + business closures.
The other aspect is contact tracing. When numbers are very low, its much easier to do diligent contact tracing around every infected person. In the recent outbreak in Sydney they tracked down and personally contacted everyone they could place in the vicinity of an infected person and asked them to self isolate. By the time a handful of those people tested positive, most of them had already been isolating and as a result didn't infect anyone - which broke the chain of transmission. We could do that because the number of new cases was only around ~10/day. That would be way less feasible at Montreal's 1600 cases/day.
UK is an island and is the worst country in the world per-capita.
Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.
Yes, agreed. It’s embarrassing for the UK... my point was that there is no example of a western, liberal country not being an island that was able to reach zero Covid. It’s just way easier as an island state.
Being a transit hub is irrelevant if the people in transit do not mix with those out of transit.
Keep the (potentially) sick people on the "air side" of the airport terminal and then directly into quarantines on arrive at the final destination.
Those who bridge this gap (air crews, terminal staff) need to follow very strict measures (PPE, cleaning, regular testing) to make that work.
Perhaps more places need to decide they don't want to be a major transit hub during this pandemic? You know, restrict non-essential traffic a bit to make the essential traffic and local populace safer?
Well, if your country isn't a transit hub, then you avoid hub problems completely. If you are a hub, then you have additional problems that New Zealand doesn't, that you have to work to mitigate.
All of the European countries were able to implement border controls as the Schengen Borders Code permits.
They easily could have had a mandatory 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals and had a similar result to Australia and New Zealand. They chose instead to mimic themselves after Sweden and opted to contain rather than eliminate the virus. Even now Macron refuses to impose a lockdown.
I am just referring to facts here. I am sorry if you don’t like them. There is no western country not being an island that has zero COVID. It’s a fact don’t you agree? If you agree we can now discuss if this is just a coincidence or if it has something to do with political realities
There's also no western nation that tried NZ/Aus's "go early, go hard" policy of lockdowns and didn't reach 0 local cases.
Maybe the real difference is that we're an island. But much more likely is our different public policies. And if you need evidence, the UK is an island (like Aus/NZ) with policies more like the US and - surprise! They have case numbers more similar to the US than similar to Aus/NZ.
If you really think the island / continent thing is relevant, I'm excited to hear the story of why the US's covid disaster is somehow actually canada and mexico's fault.
I think you have it backwards. I never said being an Island will save you, see the UK. Still the fact remains that there is no other Western country which is no Island that has zero Covid. If you accept this fact we can start discussing the underlying reasons.
Maybe it’s because they’re islands, and maybe you’re right and it’s because of the policy in place. I believe it’s the former, because it’s way more difficult to control influx of people in a connected economy like the EU for example.
It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
Yeah I agree there are no other western countries with zero covid except a couple island nations. There's also no other countries which have seriously tried to get covid to 0 except some island nations - which is interesting.
I'm convinced the most important difference is policy, but I wonder if there might be some psychological effect of living on an island all by yourself which makes you think "Well, can we just pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist?". Those thoughts might be harder to think in Europe.
> It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
I think Canada could drive covid down to zero by closing the US border, then enforcing strict lockdowns. (And apparently they have closed the border to the US.) I think the US or the UK could do the same if they wanted at a national level. Well, at least in theory. I acknowledge it would be much more difficult to do the same in a small european nation. At least, it would be difficult to do it alone.
I agree with you. The most important difference is policy. And I also think the EU should have acted very differently. They should have been way quicker and more decisive.
However, bear in mind that Europe has become super interconnected in the last decade or so. There are millions crossing borders to work on the other side. Germany is a great example. Those counties close to the Czech border had way higher incidence levels, most probably due to the constant exchange with Czech Republic.
Yeah I get that, and I understand that that would make it difficult for individual nations to work alone. (Though not impossible - as other commenters have mentioned Australia successfully closed our internal borders.)
But you aren't in this alone. If Europe worked together, and your neighbors adopted similar policies it would have worked fine and covid would be under control by now.
The fact that you aren't on an island doesn't excuse the EU's bad covid policy decisions, at both the scale of individual countries and as a collective body.
> It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
This is exactly what Western Australia did. The Australian response was not nationally coordinated and each state has been doing their own thing. They have land borders between each other and yet the Victorian outbreak didn't spread to either NSW or SA because they implemented border checks by lining the roads with police and fining people who attempted to circumvent them, while WA implemented a hard border even earlier as soon as there was a non-zero number of cases.
The Australian states are geographically larger than many European countries, so I don't think it's that it's an island. The only effect nationally was hotel quarantine for arriving flights which is possible for landlocked countries as well.
Then compare the Queensland-NSW border or the Victoria-NSW border, probably comparable with most European borders or at least within 1 order of magnitude. Both borders were closed (with exceptions) at various times to contain outbreaks to one state. If we loosen up the definition of country then these are Western countries that aren't island nations with zero covid.
It shouldn't also be noted that the borders don't have to be hermetically sealed. As long as cross border contamination is minimized other tools (contact tracing) can deal with it.
Nonsense? New Zealand has 5 million people, Australia has 25 million. That's, what, London and Paris metro areas?
Europe has a lot more people living in much less space and much more integrated than isolated places with so much land like New Zealand and Australia.
> 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals
This would grind EU to a halt. Tourism alone results in 750 million international tourists visiting EU a year. Counting travels of EU citizens between EU countries would result in billions.
Sure, island countries the population size of Croatia and Romania maybe can isolate. EU as a whole? Pfff
The NZ border is unlikely to be open to non-citizens this year. We'll wait until we've vaccinated ~everyone, and since we have no community transmission, we're sitting back in the queue a bit.
Ethics of mandates aside, there’s no strong evidence that universal cloth masking in a community setting reduces transmissions, and many theoretical mechanisms by which they could worsen transmission (increased aerosol generation, deeper breaths to maintain o2 homeostasis leading to more absolute aerosols, improper handling->contamination, altered social behavior, having to speak louder or closer).
So, I would argue that you don’t have to wear a mask now because of the pandemic, you choose to wear one despite a lack of scientific evidence (or are mandated to wear one of course).
SARS-2 is a zoonotic, endemic respiratory virus. If you’re tired of it, you need to accept that it’s here to stay and realize that we can’t put life on hold indefinitely and trigger a global food shortage that will end up eclipsing COVID-19 deaths anyway (oops).
Anyway, it is your right to decide that you would like totalitarian measures enacted upon you and your family. But you shouldn’t be able to make that decision for me, and unfortunately your “side” has already won and enacted [a half-assed version of] those very failed policies that you continue to venerate across most of the globe.
If people put risk in perspective the average person would be less (or equally) afraid of COVID-19 personally than the flu, and your average elderly person would be 5-10x as afraid as the flu but not the current level of fear (feels like 100x IMO). Oh, and schools would be open worldwide with no masks nor social distancing because children are rarely harmed by COVID-19 and are frequently harmed by lockdown measures.
These are closer to pop-sci articles than proper papers. Please read everything Macintyre ever published on the topic of masking in healthcare works before 2020. Start with this one:
Linking me a bunch of public health websites isn’t convincing because these organizations don’t actually maintain epistemiological rigor, they just parrot whatever the dogma is.
The only RCT of masking for COVID-19 ever performed showed an insignificant benefit in terms of self-infection at best.
Meanwhile studies in HCW can’t rule out cloth masks causing bacterial pneumonia and increased self-infection.
Literally all of them link scientific papers, if you'd care to read.
And it's not "self-infection" that masking is a protection of. Nobody has claimed that. You wear a mask to protect those around you, and they wear their's to protect you.
Though it figures you are obsessed with the self and have no regard for the other.
No studies exist of infection to others for the obvious reason (too hard to track accurately). If you had read any of the literature you would know this.
Schools are a huge transmission vector for every communicable disease. Gathering a bunch of people from different households causes diseases to jump between households. It doesn't matter if the kids aren't harmed, it's communicating the disease through the population.
This has not shown to be the case for COVID-19. Hell, school closures weren’t even recommended by the WHO for influenza which can directly harm children.
You need to provide affirmative evidence before undertaking societal interventions with guaranteed negative impact. Does the hippocratic oath ring a bell?
The people in charge certainly seem to think that our lives can be put on hold indefinitely.
For me the most annoying thing is the idea that lockdown is somehow "saving" lives. People who are dying from COVID would have died from something else 2-3 years from now. These are old, sick people, whose lives are (mostly) behind them.
If I was an 80 yo and my grand-kids were put in prison to allow me to live a couple more years, I would be even more angry than I am right now.
>> Yes. If it means I can actually go to the gym and workout, meet my friends, etc.
It doesn't. No amount of hiding temporarily solves the problem. Authoritarian rules would be in effect until immunity rates are above herd thresholds at a minimum. There is no "one month" shutdown in the US or a connected EU country that solves the problem permanently unless you ban international travelers / force them to quarantine for 14 days in a hotel.
>Are you tired of the god damn pandemic? I know I am. Because we already have no freedom.
Well, that for you are ordinary people (govts just echo their sentiments). They will enslave you for their benefit ( real or imaginary). They will take away your freedom under the guise of concern for your health.
I find the notion of China having the virus under control hard to believe.
CCP is known to misinform with less at stake than this, and to not care all that much about large areas of rural territory (recall the one child policy, which was more or less unenforced outside of larger cities and resulted in the depressing phenomenon of millions of “invisible” children who are outside of the system and do not have access to education or healthcare). With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the virus has been raging over the countryside, unreported.
That is not to say I know one way or the other, but merely to point out that relying on official information may not be correct—one ought to look at secondary signs, such as new hospitals being built or some inconsistencies in numbers. Claiming that centralized measures helped get the virus under control based on official numbers from a totalitarian regime may be disingenuous.
While it's true they have a reason to misrepresent, I think it would be fairly obvious if hospitals were overrun with patients. The great firewall is not so high that that message wouldn't come out. They had good reason to keep the prison camps in Xinjiang secret too, but that came out, and there's a lot fewer of those than hospitals.
I just don’t think many messages come out at all (considering bans on inbound travel and recent crackdowns on documentary uses of social media), and especially from outside of larger cities.
Any population of Chinese speakers in the west is going to know someone there on Wechat. I've talked to friends there as well, there's no major problem now. By contrast when things were bad in Wuhan people were reporting it.
On top of that there's plenty of foreign reporters there, and plenty of foreign diplomats who would also notice.
Yep. The Economist has a journalist over in China, and he was interviewed recently on the economist's podcast. He said covid has popped up a bunch of times since the pandemic started. Each time they've immediately launched strict lockdowns and border controls for the region involved. He's personally been tested 7 times or something since covid started - apparently getting tested is often a requirement to travel anywhere in China.
Those policies sound even more strict than what we've been doing in Australia, and we had 2 weeks with 0 locally transmitted cases. With procedures like that it makes sense they have covid under control.
> covid has popped up a bunch of times since the pandemic started
(The times when news got out.)
The ability of Chinese authorities to suppress the information domestically (again, recent crackdowns on using social media for self-journalism), as well as to influence Western sources, shouldn’t be underestimated. I wouldn’t mind listening to that podcast though.
I know about COVID test results required for travel, but I don’t take it as much of an indicator if you consider people outside major cities who do not travel much (especially now that there’s an extra barrier to it) and may just suffer from virus outbreaks in localized clusters where they live.
Either way, what we don’t have is reliable numbers of how many people were tested, and how many of them were positive, across China.
Australian here, living in Victoria (where we had a second wave and a strict lockdown that took us to 0). They didn't round up the whole country and put us in prison (!?). The rules we had were:
- Stay home. The only allowed reasons to leave our homes were essential supplies (eg visiting the supermarket), caring for family, going to work (if you couldn't work from home) or exercise (eg going for a walk). Or if you needed medical care.
- Unless we had a really good reason, we had to stay within a 5km radius of home at all times, and couldn't leave home for more than 1hr each day. We also had an 8pm curfew - though I'm still not sure what that was for.
- No visitors unless they're an intimate partner
- Masks mandatory any time you left your home. On the spot fines from police if they catch you outside without a mask.
Basically everything indoors was closed - no gyms, takeout only at restaurants, etc. Supermarkets had security guards to make sure nobody entered without a mask on, and they had complimentary hand sanitizer at the entrance.
That strategy was enough to go from 700/day down to 0/day in a couple months. Those months were awful, but just about everything has opened up again now since we've been sitting at 0 local infections in the whole country for the last few weeks. We only broke our streak today - a hotel quarantine worker was infected in Perth. The city has immediately locked down to make sure it doesn't spread.
If the whole world followed the same strategy, covid would be gone already and international travel could have resumed months ago.
Montreal is following the same rules, down to the silly curfew, but, we're at 600 cases a day still and rising. Obviously people aren't following it, but... It doesn't seem to be enough.
Because of the incubation period, covid numbers are effectively delayed 2 weeks. That is to say, there's a 2 week delay between the time your government changes policies and when you see the effect of those policies on covid case numbers. It took us awhile too - after they brought the lockdown into effect our numbers kept going up for awhile - which was terrifying. But the numbers trended down eventually.
Looking at the case numbers, that looks pretty similar to the numbers here in Victoria. You're down from a peak of 3000/day on Jan 9, (as predicted, a couple weeks after your brought your lockdowns into effect) down to 1600/day.
Looks like the policy is working and you'll hit 0 if you keep it up for a few more months. Why are you stopping?
Good question. It's reported as pressure from store owners and the local religious community. Returning vacationers are also against it. Legally, it has to be a temporary measure, so it has to be a hard deadline for reconsideration - perhaps, they might actually extend it.
Are we going to ignore the fact AUS and NZ are island nations who have nearly permanently banned international arrivals unless there's a 14 day quarantine upon entering, and sometimes that's not even allowed?
The United States can't stop illegal immigration and cross-border state travel with or without a pandemic. The laws and expectations are significantly different in connected regions like the US and EU compared to a singular island nation.
The US's covid numbers aren't high because of a few people crossing the mexican border illegally. (And Mexico seems to be handling covid better than the US anyway.)
Being an island has nothing to do with it. The difference is due to different health policies.
- We had mandatory masks in all public places here in Melbourne with on the spot fines by police. Over in the US lots of people thought covid is a hoax, and even your president refused to wear a mask.
- Australia declared mass gatherings to be illegal - it went through the courts and the judges decided public safety trumped a citizen's rights to protest during the pandemic. Germany's courts ruled in the opposite direction for an anti-mask protest. And meanwhile the US had BLM protests for months, presidential rallies and the capital hill riot.
And so on. These differences have nothing to do with sharing your continent with Canada and Mexico. They have everything to do with culture and public policy.
> These differences have nothing to do with sharing your continent with Canada and Mexico. They have everything to do with culture and public policy.
Exactly. I live in Washington State and even now, one major party in our Legislature is trying to get at least three bills through that would declare "Emperor" (language not used in the bill, but definitely on Twitter) Inslee's emergency orders, including the mask mandate, void and tell everyone to do what they think best. Which, fine, except for the whole community transmission and insisting on businesses be open--with those employees being told "work or starve"--things.
We've been hearing for many months that masks are required and must be worn and put them on and yet...everyone disclaims all responsibility for enforcing this. I don't blame retail employees from saying "we do not want to be on the other end of a screaming patron in exchange for minimum wage," but when even the government tells us that they're relying solely on people's discretion and good sense, things fall flat. I'm not saying arrest everyone who has their nose hanging atop a mask, that would be disproportionately unwise, but we absolutely can and should be having people in authority out day and night at shops, buses, parks, ferries, and so on reminding people that your nose goes under your mask.
I mostly agree with you but Mexico is one of the very few countries that has done worse than the US. By one ranking they are second to last in the world, only ahead of Brazil (it sounds like the US was ranked fifth worst with Colombia and Iran also doing worse).
I'd very much support this. Somehow America thought this was fine for decades when somebody might be smoking a joint, but now it's fascism when it actually has a material purpose. Pretend like the people with covid actually have drugs and 10 days in jail sounds absurdly progressive when viewed in terms of very recent history. Covid is a gateway drug to full respiratory failure, and it takes very little peer pressure to spread it.
edit: also, I thought our pretense for harassing prostitutes was to stop the spread of disease. If we don't actually care about disease we should stop harassing them so they can have have a few years of freedom from interference before a strain of covid mutates into the death rate of MERS and civilization falls because we can't live like the awful Chinese.
Yeah I don't think lockdowns have worked universally. Even stringent ones like those in India where cases picked up quickly after they opened up.
What seems to have worked in Wuhan was, in addition to lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing and isolation of symptomatic patients and their close contacts in centralized quarantine facilities.
Once all of this is done, I hope we learn more about how China actually contained this. But the answer is likely authoritarian measures that no democracy can legally or politically afford.
I was in a Vietnamese quarantine in March as a foreigner. It's definitely not a prison. There are two types of quarantine: before and after the test. The second one is pretty good and you can even live in a special hotel.
Exactly what we have in NZ right now. But it’s not prison (which is emotional language at best).
Quarantining is done in nice hotels, and people are treated well. Special accommodations are even made for extended family groups.
Definitely a report we did not want to hear. Just the the record though, the author is factually wrong about Denmark being one of the jurisdictions that "chose not to stamp out this virus and blithely tolerated high infection rates" and is probably referring to Sweden - see https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/the-nor....
Melbourne, Australia had a 4-month lockdown which turned an exponentially-rising 500+ cases a day scenario into elimination. Saving thousands of lives.
No other place has managed to do something similar and it shows hotel quarantine of foreign arrivals, aggressive contact-tracing, mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing and lockdowns work. The Swedish laissez-faire approach does not.
Yes, but here in NZ we didn't wait until there were 500 infections to act. The lockdown was instituted around the time of <100 active infections being detected and our level 4 lockdown is far more stringent than any US state lockdown.
This might be a bit low-level, but the Wikipedia page [1] has a pretty good blow-by-blow description of events.
I recommend looking at the Victoria section of that page, as Victoria had by far the largest outbreak to cope with.
For a more high-level overview, I like the BBC’s article, which talks about their opinions on the most important steps taken by the government, as well as the most critical mistakes. Note that it dates to October of last year and so doesn’t include mention of the three cases which induced a brief tightening of lockdown for a few weeks after the article was published.
This is not true. Hard lockdown that people follow seems to work. But lowdown only doesn't work.
1. Not all lockdown are equal, look at Germany how long they have a been in a soft lockdown so that death can decrease? like 2 months? Not sure at this point this is due to lockdown
2. If people don't follow the order it doesn't work, Peru one of the toughest and longest lockdown but yet also the highest mortality in the world
I'm pretty sure OP is implying that lockdowns which are properly enforced do work, obviously. A lockdown is anything but if people can just move about and ignore the rules defeating the whole purpose of a lockdown.
All throughout Australia lockdowns worked because they were enforced.
Large fines, arrests publicised on television and a strong police presence across the cities ensured that people weren't given the choice about to whether to comply or not. Now does it introduce questions about whether people's civil liberties were infringed ? Absolutely. But it works.
Most people cannot make money while locked down. Who pays their bills? Are they expected to burn through all savings to become destitute enough to qualify for aid? Are landlords and mortgage holders supposed to deal without any revenue?
Is caging up your citizens to avoid a disease that has a miniscule chance of death (for all but its oldest citizens) really necessary? Is it ok to saddle future generations with government debt to pay for these lockdowns?
Why single out Sweden? UK, who have/had more stringent lockdown rules than Sweden, are facing 1,540 deaths per million. Sweden is at 1,120 and roughly equal to France, Switzerland. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
The UK one is strong on paper, but enforcement is beyond poor. No company has been sanctioned for breaking workplace COVID rules and the on the streets in some areas you wouldn’t know there was supposed to be a lockdown. And they still haven’t got quarantine for international arrivals - seems that a year ago it was deemed too disruptive.
Australia is big and sparely populated compared to other countries that implemented full lockdowns. Also, it's summer down there, with heat waves, etc. All of this diminishes virus' ability to spread. It's very situational. Australia is not doing anything more special than other countries. You gotta look into the meaning of these numbers and just the value.
Lockdowns do work, technically speaking, but not in the long-run. Virus doesn't care and will operate as usual, albeit at slower rate. Persistent things those viruses are.
Lockdowns make sense only at the beginning of a pandemic and their only sane purpose is to give the health care segment to prepare itself for the hit. Beyond that it's a lost cause. You're not saving thousands of lives, you're just extending the inevitable further down in the future, while your economy is sinking, which will create even more problems down the road.
So even if you stay inside the cave forever, the bear will still come.
1. 71% of Australians live in a handful of cities each of which has very high density relative to the rest of the world.
2. Lockdowns occurred during winter.
3. Australia has effectively eliminated COVID-19 and by having so few cases it allows for targeted lockdowns to work over the long-term e.g. Perth just had 1 case today and is having a short 5-day lockdown - their first in 10 months.
What’s your source? What geographic region are you counting as “Melbourne”, for example?
If we’re talking just about Melbourne’s CBD (which might be a sensible thing to do seeing as we’re talking about people being clustered in the cities and not about the surrounding suburbs, national parks, and rural areas which presumably are included in your “Melbourne” number), then the actual number for Melbourne is around 19,000 people/km2 [1], which is at least in the ballpark of the numbers you’ve given for other major cities. Although again, you don’t give enough details to know specifically what those numbers actually mean.
What factors led to the effectiveness of the Melbourne lockdown? Choices are things like compliance, geography, particulars of the rules (8pm curfew, 5km movement radius), enough of a population that is able to work from home, enough economic support for those who couldn’t (job keeper etc) - to slow down population mixing and interrupt transmission chains. Contact tracing was overhauled midway through and that coincides with the turnaround [0,1].
Would those measures work in similarly-high-density cities? The awkward fact is that most of the cases in greater Melbourne were outside the densely-populated CBD [2], that much of the transmission occurred in lower-paid (McDonalds) and less-safe (meatpacking) workplaces, people whose home language was not English, as well as in shared living conditions.
There’s a temptation to fit the data to the narrative you want, but (as far as I’m aware) the data you’d need to pick any one of these factors as conclusive hasn’t been released. Gestures in the direction of geography as the _one thing_ that enabled elimination are silly and ignore the vast amount of effort and personal sacrifice and organisation and argument and collaboration that went into that result.
Lockdowns do work — even if that’s not quite the end of the story.
The biggest issue with these strategies is that they're somewhat easier to execute in island nations.
I don't see how most of the EU countries can follow this strategy. Germany für example has porous borders with Denmark, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech republic, Poland. If they don't in turn all follow this strategy we'd have to militarily secure all these borders and stop anybody from going through. This would cause an enormous hit to the economies and cost a lot of money in military gear and personnel to execute.
Now for the next scenario, say the whole EU + Switzerland + UK decide to follow zero Covid. Then we still have a boatable connection to Africa and a pretty large land border with Asia to defend. Despite the never before seen political coordination this would need, this would create very harsh humanitarian situations along those borders, even worse than what we've seen in recent years.
So all in all I don't think it's that easy to use island nation strategies for mostly land locked nations.
Just for clarity.. the lockdown we’re talking about was Victoria.
That’s just one of Australia’s states, and we were the only state with a severe lockdown like this. We have massive land borders with South Australia and New South Wales.
i just seem to miss why its favorable to curtail millions (incl. children) of their lives and stomp the economy for the benefit of thousands. shouldn't we have banned alcohol, tabacco, ice-cars, firearms, gambling ... first if this was so important?
But also, having lived in both countries for more than 20 years each (including being in Melbourne now and throughout the lockdowns), I can’t imagine a country like the US ever engaging in a lockdown, or it working if they tried. It just doesn’t match their national role models of how people are supposed to act and what they’re supposed to care about.
The whole defining ideal here in Australia is “mateship”. As you’re growing up, the revered role model that you’re told you should emulate is the “good mate”; being compassionate, taking people as they are, taking care of each other. That’s what they tell each other it means to be Australian.
The equivalent mythic figure at the center of US society is the cowboy. It’s all about rugged individualism over there. And sure you take pains to protect your own family, but certainly not anybody else’s. Anything which requires one to take an ounce of inconvenience to help the society as a whole, that’s just not what Americans are generally raised to value. Those other folks ought to be taking care of their own families, after all. So you’ve got a whole society of people where the majority say “I’m not going to wear a mask if it mostly protects you.” And you’re certainly not going to convince a large enough percentage of people to obey a mandate as inconvenient as a requirement to stay inside their house for months at a time for it to be effective. They just won’t do it.
I don’t know what realistic options they have in the US. I hope they find one. It’s indisputable that lockdowns do work if followed.. but it’s also true that the US will never be able to make the majority of their population comply with one. It just doesn’t fit the country’s stories about themselves.
EDIT: In the above, I make a bunch of sweeping generalisations about huge populations of people, and I’m obviously not saying that everyone in those populations think those ways. I’m just pointing out the difference in what America says being American is about, and what Australia says being Australian is about.
> Morally, raising mink for fur is equal to eating meat or consuming dairy products.
Meat and dairy products feed humans, which is a necessity (that, in our day and age, may or may not be achieved by other means while still maintaining a healthy diet), while fur is a luxury product - by no means necessary. It isn't even a byproduct, the fur is the sole reasons the minks are killed.
I can't even fathom how you can see these two things in the same light, morally.
Food is a necessity, but red meat is just one way to meet that necessity. There's a number of natural and synthetic substitutes that can accomplish the same goals (calories, protein, etc)
Clothing is a necessity, but fur is just one way to meet that necessity. There's a number of natural and synthetic substitutes that can accomplish the same goals (avoiding nudity when it would be considered immoral, staying warm in cold climates, etc)
What's the difference? Is fur just worse because it serves as a status symbol in addition to the practical purposes?
Maybe not relevant for mink vs cow farming, but in some situations I think killing animals for their fur is morally and environmentally superior to raising and killing animals for their meat. Louisiana nutria bounty program is a net positive for the native ecology, which I don't think could be said for most meat products.
> Is fur just worse because it serves as a status symbol in addition to the practical purposes?
Yeah, it’s easy to be against it and feel good about yourself without making a sacrifice in your life. Wear fur and eat meat folks, but stop with logical inconsistencies!
Humans in our age can live without fur and without meat and dairy. They are both nice luxuries. Enjoy it, but let’s put logical inconsistencies to the side
That the mink industry still existed in this day and age in a country such as Denmark was in my opinion a complete travesty to begin with. Having all these animals in ridiculously small cages just for the sake of their fur - the cruelty is appalling.
As cruel as Corona itself is - it did bring a few good things, killing the Mink industry was definitely one of them in my opinion.
Those Mink were already dead at birth, whether they die today en masse or tomorrow one at at a time makes no difference. The ethical choice is to not conceive them in the first place.
He is also factually wrong on at least one other thing:
“He finds it astonishing that COVID-19 has boosted its infectiousness by 30 to 50 per cent over previous strains by doing what viruses do: evolve, mutate and adapt for more effective reproduction.”
The UK strain seems to be 25% more infectious. It’s still bad but less than mentioned.
EDIT: source is the latest Drosten podcast, where he referenced to some new evidence and papers. Here’s the transcript (in German), see page 9 bottom.
The article leads with B117 but B.1.351, the South African variant, is approximately 50% more contagious. Probably just a minor mix-up on the author's part.
Maybe. At the same time the UK strain was initially also estimated at 70% and the later detailed studies have corrected this number down. Might be the same case with the SA one
Here on the ground in Portugal I'd say the government's response is apparently competent but it's just not effective. Although the country is simply following what others are doing, the population is taking this very seriously. Mask wearing outside is pretty universal except if you're exercising, everybody is working from home where possible and the schools are closed (finally). But it's not enough. The problem is that family ties are very strong here. Relaxing the rules for 36 hours at Christmas and 24 hours at New Year was absolutely the wrong thing to do and that is why the death toll has doubled in the five weeks since then.
Funny he puts more faith in Astrazeneca vaccin. True it's logistics are easier. But it's efficacy is not... Worse given the higher transmission rates of the new strains it in itself might not be sufficient to prevent further spread. Higher R0 requires higher efficacy to keep R below 1.
None of the variants so far are any more lethal than the original. Isn't that right? I have heard nothing to the contrary, although this guy seems to think it's already happened.
You miss the point - a virus with a 1% death rate of those infected, that mutates into a virus 50% more transmissible, with a 1% death rate of those infected, is obviously likely to kill more people.
If I look a the infection numbers of South Africa and UK, I completely fail to see how there variants are more infectious. Also, in Brazil, where life seems to go on as usual, there is no exponential growth of cases. Do you have any numbers that prove that the new strains are actually spreading faster in society?
The UK variant which will be the dominant strain in the USA in a couple months is more deadly, and I believe the same is true for the South Africa version. Both more infectious, and both more lethal.
>The UK variant which will be the dominant strain in the USA in a couple months is more deadly,
That's not what is in the article. It says "“there is a realistic possibility that infection with” the country’s dominant Covid-19 variant “is associated with an increased risk of death compared to infection with” other strains of the coronavirus."
What they are saying is basically "we do not know".
No that is not obvious at all. It doesn't depend on the transmission rate, just on how many people get infected. Higher transmission rate just means it spreads faster, not that it infects more people in the end.
Transmissibility is a key component to the death rate. People who don't get infected don't die from it, but as more and more people catch it, more roll the dice.
The article explains this. Think of it as an MLM scam or compound interest. The lethality rate just gives you a scalar increase on all the events that would have occurred. Lethality can go to infinity for all we care if transmission goes to zero. But even at low fatality rates, if everyone on earth gets it, that is a huge number of dead.
Think of two kinds of fires burning at different levels of a forest. The lethality could even go down, transmission rates could go up and still kill more people.
I wonder what the effects of rapidly vaccinating your population would be, like Israel is currently doing.
There are still children and people who can’t tolerate a vaccine, but vaccinating 6.5M out of 8.5M people quickly (assuming 2M children and 800k that have or soon will catch COVID) should have a huge effect on the r rate.
The author never says it and probably because he knows the reaction it would cause. "Decisive" lockdown at this point would likely be a troops patrolling the street type of event with extreme restrictions on leaving one's home.
I don't see that being anywhere near politically acceptable in many areas of the country.
>along with clear messaging around goals and exit criteria.
This! The lack of clear exit criteria and the continous moving of goalposts convinced me that the pandemic is used as a vehicle for a political agenda and even if it mutated into a mild cough politicians would still try to keep the hysteria alive, at least in the EU and Canada.
Of course. The board of directors in a company work to make their shareholders re-elect them. The leaders in democracies work to make the populace want them re-elected, or scared enough not to dare select an alternative
"He notes that a more infectious virus is more dangerous than a more lethal one, “because every new case will infect more people, and each of them will infect more people, such that the number of cases will grow exponentially.”"
Oh my god, that sounds horrible - except, that's how EVERY infectious disease works. We have been living with that kind of diseases forever.
Also, no, they don't grow exponentially. The population saturates.
The New Zealand or Taiwan model works because you don't let the virus enter in the first place.
Also New Zealand and Australia are in Summer right now. Just 30 seconds of Australia sun radiation now will kill(inactivate) any virus on any surface. Temperature will dry the membrane of any COVID virus that remains on the shadow. People immune system is much stronger in Summer, and people go out, do not live that close together as in Winter.
Once you let it enter like the UK, Spain, Italy or US did, it is too late.
It took three months for the Spain going "from 1 to 0", and it was the biggest catastrophe for the economy and democracy itself in decades, because it takes time for the spread to halve. And it did not get a real 0 after all the pain. Spanish' Spring and Summer had probably the biggest effect after all.
It is not that catastrophic by the way. Once people get infected, they do not get infected away, and just protecting people over 65 years old with vaccine will stop most deads.
In fact just going for people over 80 years old have a significant effect on deads.
In the US, 15% of the population is over 65 years old and 9% already got the first dose. Next month most of them will be immune.
Australia did "let" it enter, and had worse per capita infection rates than the UK for a while, and still got control of it and eliminated it. I don't think it's too late, but I (in NZ) think other countries have done pretty soft and ineffective "lockdowns".
As a citizen of New Zealand I believe a short, sharp lock-down combined with test & contact trace is the only route to zero.
I think that this option is far far better than being in "half measures" restrictions for very long periods of time.
When a country announces their lock-down measures I feel excited for their populace that they might finally be heading to zero.
Then I read the holes in the measures:
- Resturants open, even if only for takeout.
- People mixing bubbles with friends
- Working from an office when WFH is possible
- Anything beyond food, health and utilities being considered "essential" and allowed
- Lack of financial support so it is not financially feasible to take public health measures (stay home, feed family, get tested, get healthcare).
I can't wait for other countries to simply copy the New Zealand quarantine rules and institute an Alert level 4 lockdown, not some half-hearted level 3 / 2 ripoff.
When all the citizens are in this together, when they all see the shared sacrifice and they have the means to actually take a lock-down together ... it's a huge weight off. It would only take 6 weeks of true level 4 to transform the infection rate of any nation - the virus dies out if it cannot spread.
>> I can't wait for other countries to simply copy the New Zealand quarantine rules
When the United States of America can relocate to an island and near-permanently ban travel into the country like NZ has, we'll do that, I guess.
EDIT: Ah yes, HN the libertarian paradise unless it's about COVID, then the recommendations are non-practical authoritarian measures and citing island nation success and hurling downvotes. Keep them coming.
It's possible to close borders without being on an island. I (in NZ) don't think the the island factor is essential. The USA has more active military personnel than almost any other country, enough to make closing borders pretty easy compared with many other places.
It's not clear that it is possible. The obvious point of comparison is China, which has continually had to fight off new waves of infections despite strong lockdowns and strong border restrictions. (A lockdown started just 2 weeks ago covering about as many people as the total population of Australia.)
They do seem to be doing ok with it. Their lockdowns and done properly and actually work. ( speaking from the UK where arrivals still quarantine on the honour system and govt offices are hot spots despite being declared ‘COVID safe’)
I'm not saying they're doing badly, just that they've been unable to fully close their borders to the virus despite being equally committed to doing so.
>> I (in NZ) don't think the the island factor is essential.
Why are the countries consistently being cited for doing good jobs in this thread seem to be island nations? Exclude AUS and NZ from the analysis and there are very few landlocked countries doing a good job without very authoritarian measures that are unlikely to be legal in the countries doing poorly.
Probably because our (NZ) governments are simpler. The entire New Zealand government is probably more similar to a state legislature than it is to the US govt.
The UK could have also succeeded but the government didn't have the will to even try early on. Now they are only willing to take half measures.
Also, we DID (NZ, AUZ) have a small advantage since we had less inbound infected for a few weeks early on due to distance. But then again, other nations (US, UK, ...) didn't even try to pursue an elimination strategy.
Eh. My country, a small EU member having land border with several EU members and other countries did a good job in spring. Next-to-zero cases in summer. Then the public demanded to open up the gates. We ended up #1 in Europe around Christmas...
>> Shut down the highway off-ramps into towns with some sort of inter-state quarantine scheme (make this legal)
"Make this legal" is a pretty hand-wavy way to say that it isn't legal and isn't likely to become legal. Restricting interstate travel is going to be very difficult to both achieve and to survive federal court challenges.
Some toolkits are not available to some countries. The United States is unlikely to be able to effectively use the authoritarian measures other countries have used.
Pointing this out gets mass downvotes on HN which is a typical libertarian paradise, but when it comes to COVID, is all about authoritarian measures to get it done. I'd be fine with them too if they were at all practical in this country, but they aren't.
I concur it was hand-wavy. I'd hope there was some acceptable measure you could get through the courts here in the name of health.
Such a barrier is only really essential when different states have different rules. If you could get all states to agree on a lock-down it would go a long way. You might be able to set up quarantine barriers as you exit the interstate? I don't know.
Personally, I think it is terms like "libertarian paradise" which lead to down-votes. Talk about the issues, not some made up catch all names like "libertarian"
>> I'd hope there was some acceptable measure you could get through the courts here in the name of health.
Interstate commerce clause is going to be nearly impossible to subvert in courts, much less state autonomy, and non-cooperating governors (primarily Republican, I'm sure, but Gov. Polis likely wouldn't go for it either).
>> Talk about the issues, not some made up catch all names like "libertarian"
My comment was downvoted -3 before I even mentioned the word "libertarian." COVID has a way of bringing out the authoritarians in HN.
I am not either. I see the value in authoritarian measures, I really do. I also realize they won't work in the US because of both compliance and lack of legal purchase.
We Americans are experts on what can't be done. Things that are routinely done in many places around the world, like universal healthcare, free education, and schools without shootings, are routinely declared "impossible" in America. Whenever you suggest even the slightest societal behavioral change to fight some public problem, you have hundreds of thousands of people simply dismissing it because "Americans won't do it, or the law won't allow it, or Wall Street doesn't like it, therefore it's completely impossible."
This is from a country that fought the British Empire, helped turn the tide in WW2, put a man on the moon, and made many scientific and technical achievements in the 20th century. But somehow, now, we can't seem to accomplish anything.
When it comes to scientific and technical achievements, the United States is still leading the remainder of the world and has for an entire century. When it comes to societal change, we're (still) pretty bad. It's almost like they might be related phenomenons.
I don’t think that the ability to enforce the restrictions was the most important success criteria.
Australia, NZ and the other countries that have succeeded have a pro-social culture of collective effort.
The US, and increasingly Canada as well, do not - they have an “everyone for themselves” culture.
In the end if people are not going to follow the rules it won’t matter what you try to do - you will fail. In the US and Canada people only halfheartedly follow the rules when the situation is grim, the ERs are filled and freezer trucks parked in the hospital parking lot.
Florida has free tests. I tried two places (giant parks filled with hundreds of cars waiting), the cops told me 3+ hours wait each, I went to a private clinic and was done in 20 min. But yeah, they have free and fully subsidized tests.
Apparently the logistics of it is not that simple.
You can't have just one measure. You really need all the measures mentioned in the grandparent comment.
Kind of no point having the population get tested now in the US. Without contact tracing and quarantine a positive result arrives too late to help anyone.
First you need to lock down the entire state until the daily infected is only 1% of the testing capacity. 4 weeks of level 4 lock-down would do that. Then with contact-tracing you can start to get ahead of the virus by quarantining infected people (close contacts of the positive test) before they even transmit Covid further.
Also, I'm sorry that you are experiencing life in a state as infected as Florida. It sounds terrifying. I hope you get well soon and stay safe.
Have a look at Vietnam then, they have handled this really well. Or for ans even better comparison to the US, China. There’s a lot to criticise about the CCP including their initial response and transparency, but it seems pretty clear they are now on top of it using similar tactics.
Vietnam banned international inbound travel without a 14-day quarantine and extinguished local transmission via test and trace. These are both very good ideas and both impractical for the United States.
The former is a logistical nightmare in a collection of states that basically is not possible to carry out due to our incompetent government and the scale of international travel in the US being several orders of magnitude higher than Vietnam's per capita (and gross rates of course) and the latter won't work (and hasn't worked when we tried it) because our population is inherently distrustful of our government(s) and generally have the right to be that way.
Again, not all tools smaller countries have are available to larger ones, and vice versa (America/EU/etc have better access to vaccines as a plus, for example).
Vietnam also put vietnamese in "prison" like quarantine for every suspicion.. that can't be done in the US/EU. It won't be accepted, and there is already too many cases.
The distrust of government is a major obstacle. In NZ we have a government that took a science-based and very transparent approach, and is pretty well trusted (it helped that opposition parties mostly agreed with the measures). The government basically said "Here is the situation. Here is what we need to do to fix it. Because of that, here's the rules. And here's how we'll help." And most of the population just went "Well, okay then.", and complied, with some grumbles.
I don't see why the USA or Canada can't do what NZ did. If you are serious about stopping travel into the country by closing the border to travellers - and actually quarantining the residents who come back home - then you only have the relatively minor flow of illegal land crossing. Neither Canada nor the US have even tried.
This article is about zero COVID. “Relatively minor flow” (btw I’m not convinced it’s even minor...) means you never eradicate the virus (which is why I oppose the idea of zero covid categorically)
The outbreak in Victoria in May-Sep 2020 was the source of the majority of all COVID cases in Australia.
Sharing a land border with Victoria did not make it impossible for New South Wales or Victoria to get back to zero - and that's states, not countries, so the extent of the border infrastructure is a few "Welcome to Victoria" signs.
Yes, the holes in the "lockdowns" elsewhere are kind of unbelievable. If the lockdown is hard enough, and the financial support is there for those who need it, then it can be short and effective.
Yep. Life in NZ has been almost completely normal for ~10 of the last 12 months (one hard ~6 week lockdown, one short mostly-region-specific one followed by a couple of weeks of mask-wearing).
New Zealand had it very easy with its geography. Same for other relatively small islands. Place like EU with its own national, often competing goals can't be effectively 100% locked out. That's what happens when you have a federation with strong independent parts.
Not that I disagree with your points, they should be the baseline for any serious covid response. Lockdown measures have so far always been watered down by politicians due to pressures from business. Business is this time acting staggeringly idiotically, prolonging the situation due to fear of complete shutdown. At the end, they get hurt much more.
Some local info - Swiss are faring quite well, while not having that many things closed, ie ski resorts work (since its outdoor activity). Not restricting traveling within country. France on the other hand is going again mental (liberté has long abandoned the place of revolution, but that's happen when you go extreme left in real world). Closing many basic things, but ie annual sales in shopping centres were going very strong till today.
I mean how fucking stupid you can be, close outdoor business giving salaries to significant part of population, and on the other side allowing large indoor gatherings of people so they can buy cheap clothes and stores can clean their stock. Even now they only close those > 20,000m2 surface.
Outdoor activities also keep many people sane and in good health, which at this point is becoming significant negative side effect of this whole situation. Most people I know, including myself, the fitness level declined in last year. That is tightly coupled with mental health. At least spring will fix things up a bit (looking forward to run in the park again, more sun, less rain).
The geography in NZ is I think a secondary factor.
Due to its isolation and reliance on agriculture, NZ has always had a very strong bio security policy and the systems in place to effect it. (Try bringing in a apple, pot of honey or muddy shoes. Actually don’t!).
So when they had to make the call, they weren’t exactly starting from scratch.
In addition, virtually everyone got behind the lockdown and made it work together- this is nothing to do with geography and all to do with good leadership, and a strong society.
Finally, there was a solid "all of government" pandemic plan. Although it got tidied up and dressed up a bit for the public, the basic structure was already in place (in 2017) well before Covid-19 occurred.
This ensured that the right people had the right terminology when a nationwide mobilization was required.
In Europe, the conclusion was that you simply cannot do that, physically. It is so integrated, even for essentials such as food or medication, that you have a huge area, requiring delivery/lorry drivers whizzing around, medical staff in hospitals and care homes, etc. Short sharp shock just can’t happen.
So then, if you’re stuck in shades of gray, you have to weigh the antiviral benefits of the lockdown with just keeping the lights out. That’s a tough one to balance.
Kudos to New Zealand, I’m just not sure it’s a blueprint others can replicate.
Lorry drivers should only live in one city. Anywhere else, they need to "self isolate" - contact-less reception of food, hand-off of documents etc.
On return home, they need to assume they became infected en-route and use PPE suitable for that reality.
Medical staff already know how to avoid taking disease home. They just need the funding and support to access the right PPE, facilites and reasonable hours. If they are in transit, the need a good reason and well thought out measures.
Quarantines don't need to stop all people, just those who are likely to spread the disease.
In Europe, the sad truth is that lorry drivers don't really "live" anywhere, except in the cabs of their trucks. Maybe they get a few weeks of home vacation per year, but other than that, they're permanently on the road.
More generally, these rules are all nice and well, but unless you are you going to give every person his or her own policeman to make sure that they follow them, people will keep stretching, bending and breaking the rules - of course, some (maybe even most?) behave responsibly, but the virus only needs a few who don't...
You’re one step away from just advocating for a global world government.
Massive centralized control never ends well.
You’re close to the insight here though: there is a pragmatic solution, and it’s to stop waging war against an endemic respiratory virus of zoonotic origin. It’s like struggling in quicksand; trying to escape just makes it worse. That’s real pragmatism.
Kudos to New Zealand, but I'll restate the obvious here: for this strategy it really helps if you're an island - not only with the initial implementation of the strategy, but also with staying virus-free once you reach that state. Because in NZ everyone who enters the country is registered and can be forced to follow the quarantine rules. By contrast, in the EU, we have land borders without border checks. Sure, people returning from another country should get a test and quarantine if it's positive - but does anyone know who travelled where and is required to get a test? No...
A small anecdotal example of why this complicates fighting the pandemic: during the first wave, eastern Germany got off relatively easy, with few cases. Czechia was even better, because they locked their borders and hardly had any cases initially. Then, during the summer/early autumn, Germany had the usual rules with masks, distancing, no large gatherings etc., while Czechia had much laxer/less-enforced rules. So guys from Germany would throw their bachelor party in Czechia, get infected and then infect everyone at their wedding a few days later. Which led not only to Czechia having a catastrophic number of cases in October, but also to eastern Germany (particularly Saxony) being hardest hit in the second wave.
Because the US has had so much success securing its southern border, and because taking the necessary actions to truly close it wouldn't be a total political shitstorm.
If we actually did contact tracing, illegal crossings of infected people would be easy enough to deal with. Infections in the US are not being driven by sick people coming in from Mexico.
Very fallacious reasoning here. No-one is saying that infections are driven by Mexican immigrants.
Rather they’re pointing out the obvious: if you’re trying to get to zero COVID, all it takes is one person to start the chain. Thus you cannot have ANY illegal immigration.
FWIW I strongly oppose the “zero COVID” goal because it’s completely unrealistic. We’ll see if the island nations can maintain it long-term but certainly in the US it’s a non-starter.
It's not fallacious reasoning. See the sentence in my other comment where I addressed your reply: If we actually did contact tracing, illegal crossings of infected people would be easy enough to deal with.
Sure, we'd have to actually do something, but it would take less resources than we are expending on medical care, for instance.
The countries with low infection levels don't need to maintain it for all that much longer, we have effective vaccines. Probably 6 months (At which point they will likely have vaccinated much of their populations).
Well, that's easier said then done. First, you have lots of people living in one country and commuting to work over the border. Second, the economy is so integrated that closing the borders or even introducing border checks leads to major economic disruptions. Third, in democratic countries you'll have those pesky people asking you if all these limitations are really necessary and not an undue restriction of their constitutional rights, so it will probably end up before the supreme court...
The basic problem i see with "Get to Zero" is that it's an extreme position, and politicians always tend to find a compromise in everything they do. So unless you can get everyone to agree to this goal, it's simply not realistic in a democracy, regardless of the scientific merit.
Sure sure, everybody has heard all those arguments. What's new here is the idea, and it's hard to argue with, that living with waves upon waves of infectious disease, on purpose, for years, is itself an extreme position that unduly restricts the economy and personal freedom, for longer than a proper lockdown would. And it also kills more people, and something ought to be said about their right to life & liberty.
I can't find it right now, of course, but somebody -- I think it was Tom Scott -- had a decent video early on in the pandemic that said, "as a pandemic gets bigger, it gets more weird."
Coronaviruses mutate, and every single infected human becomes a petri dish for new mutations. The rest is straightforward natural selection: the most efficient covid-19 variants will win. We might get lucky; the most efficient variant might accidentally mutate away all the things that makes it deadly to humans. There might even be some selection pressure for that.
But it could also stay about as deadly while changing enough about its spike protein to defeat antibodies in previously infected individuals and get more infectious in the process, and that would be a really bad scenario.
I've been stunned for the last 12 months at the volume of the people that are totally okay with this, since we have no way of knowing right now how this might turn out over the next few years.
Last spring, we were flattening the curve. Last summer, we were waiting for a vaccine. Last fall, we were solving the logistical challenges for production. Now I'm starting to see headlines that "just because there's a vaccine, doesn't mean it's over"?
I'm 25. I've spent the last year in a small apartment alone with my dog. If the problem is that we didn't lock down well enough the first time, why should I believe a better job will be done this time?
If the CDC says it, I'll do it. But I'm tired of reading "science writers" constantly shitting on the situation. Really makes me wonder why I bothered in the first place.
I thought "American science has given us a Lamborghini when what the world needs is a Toyota" was a particular gem in this piece. I could swear six months to a year ago I was reading people like this guy saying we shouldn't expect a vaccine to be discovered soon, if ever.
The problem is that if 80% of the population do their civic duty and stay home while the remaining 20% carry on with life as usual - go to bars and sporting events, protest, and so on then the numbers won't come down. The reality of covid is that a few selfish people can easily ruin the hard work of everyone else.
Here in Australia we tried asking people who were infected to just quarantine in their own homes. Eventually the police went around and started doing spot checks, and found that a bunch of people who had known positive covid tests had gone in to work! No no no - you need strict enforcement to go along with lockdown rules or it just doesn't seem to work.
> Moreover, our politicians have placed their bets on two high-tech, two-shot and costly vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna. They require refrigeration that half the world can’t afford.
> American science has given us a Lamborghini when what the world needs is a Toyota
There is no Pfizer vaccine ... it's German science from Biontech. The author doesn't even get this detail right. Why should I take his panicky opinion serious?
> They actually represent an entirely new pandemic.
This is semantics abused for FUD. It's not a new pandemic - period.
> And by New Zealand’s or Taiwan’s measure, we look very bad.
Did it even occur to this guy that his favorite reference countries are small islands with basically just one major ship and airport?
> Be like a zero hero, like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern.
This whole text is just a cheesy opinion piece - not a scientific view.
> No politician wanted to hear that evidence [by Drosten], and many continue to ignore it.
Not true - he's been the court scientist of German government since early 2020.
Not to mention that Moderna's vaccine doesn't require special refrigeration that 'half the world can't afford', just the pfizer/biontech vaccine. Moderna's vaccine can be stored in regular refrigeration for up to 30 days.
“ New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Iceland and Taiwan got it right. They went to zero and eliminated the virus. Atlantic Canada and the North got it right, too.”
These countries are all islands. How is that representative of the rest of the world and how they can handle it?
This author appears to be completely unaware that, in the US anyway, the progress of the pandemic has been completely and totally disconnected from all control measures.
San Francisco, where I'm told (and believe, based on having lived there) that they had very strict lockdown measures:
The stats are virtually identical despite dramatically different policy decisions. So what the hell is the point?
As an addendum, to put this into perspective: in 2020, Oakland's murder rate was 23/100k, making it _almost as high as the covid death rate_. Why is it that one year of covid deaths is a world-destroying incident, but _every_ year of Oakland deaths and nobody does anything about it ever? Are Bay Area people really just that racist?
My perception, born and raised east-bay, is the Oakland has been a lost cause (for murders) since at least 1985. And more than one mayoral candidate has talked up the issue.
But, and this is the terrible part, the murder happens to "the poors". So, IMO,, it's less about racism and more about classism (possibly rooted in racism).
It's similar to how we (usa) don't care too much about the covid deaths. It's like Earthican tradition for disease and pestilence to affect poor folks first/more and for the wealthy to just not see it (they simply look the other way).
Nowhere in the US has really had harsh lockdown measures.
SF also has density issues that will drive up the r0 of the virus. While the widely quoted r0 of the virus is around 3.0, the r0 in NYC at the start of the outbreak was estimated to be 5.0
(You could argue about if that was really the r(t) and not r0, but I'm not considering time-dependence or the reaction to the virus, but the actual starting reproduction number in NYC before there was any human reaction to the virus -- that isn't a constant value but depends on the local conditions).
Austin has an overall 3,000 people per square mile density, SF has an overall 18,000 people per square mile (and some areas are even more dense than that).
Those lockdowns are not actual lockdowns, and were doomed to fail.
Moreover lockdown restrictions were removed when numbers of new cases simply lowered, as opposed to all known cases being removed from community and quarantined, and confidence there was zero community transmission.
Meanwhile borders are porous, with new cases arriving constantly. The combination of all this is heartbreakingly difficult to observe.
Honestly this stuff is easy.
A lockdown means only essential workers who actually keep the lights on and provide food go to work, and they do with ridiculous protection.
It means no fast food delivery, no public transport or Ubers, no leaving your residence except for exercise (maybe - some places you had to stay inside) and 1/week shop at the supermarket (or delivery) with one person/household.
It means closing the borders firmly, and government-provided and provisioned (not outsourced) quarantining every arrival for at least 14 days.
And it means providing plenty of funding and kindness to businesses and people to allow them to get through without fear. Including putting homeless into homes (e.g. empty hotel rooms).
And it needs to last long enough to know and isolate every case, which is say 6-8 weeks if done properly.
The US and UK failed on every one of these tests, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead.
Meanwhile in New Zealand we did the above almost a year ago, and are enjoying our summer break essentially normally.
NZ has a population of less than ~5mil, with 1/3rd being on one city, and no land borders with anyone (people claiming "border is just as good as being an island" don't realize that, before we even get to illegal crossings, border areas in Canada/USA and Mexico/USA are integrated and numerous, whereas in NZ any cross-border traffic is designed full-time around specialized chokepoints like ports and airports.
Good luck doing that in a country of 320mil with no internal border infrastructure or legal framework whatsoever, and a huge land-based border.
That said, even if it were possible, I'd take liberty over safety (from a vastly overblown hazard by all estimates) in this case; really grateful to an American for this crisis.
Can people in the northern hemisphere stop banging on that the reason it is so easy for us to get a handle on COVID in Australia is because it is summer. We eliminated COVID in Melbourne during winter with wearing masks and real lockdowns. It was not easy. It required a huge effort of societal and political will and cooperation. It involved following the science. Stop blaming the weather.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadThe citizens of these beleaguered countries seem quite happy with the government management thus far[1]. I honestly don't know how anyone can look at the UK response thus far and think - more of that please!
[1] https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1355606835873669126
There's been very little in the way of real opposition, sadly. For instance, when the Tories do make actual fuckups Labour usually resort to off-topic complaints about idpol so the Tories just do whatever they want with no push back.
(I'm from the North, this is the general sentiment in my local community. More stringent lockdown policy is also incredibly unpopular here.)
Even Keir Starmer seems content to sit back and only critise the Government's response the day or days after a grim milestone/but of news.
Why isn't he constantly saying that the UK should totally shut their borders, for example? He should be saying this and nothing else, and directing the rest of Labour to do the same. That's how an effective opposition works.
Instead he generally chooses silence.
UK is 2.5x the population of Australia and has 136x the number of deaths.
You have to make some sacrifices to win the battle, but it seems we've paid a lot of the price (in terms of economic costs as well as deaths), but without the positives that should have come from that. As soon as there's any sign of let-up in any of the statistics, it seems the government wants to remove the measures, which seems to be a bad idea to me, but I'm a chump who's not making the decisions!
We are up for election mid-March, the ruling party and PM will be re-elected.
The populace will not 'take chances' during crises.
* PPE sourcing has been poor.
* Track and trace has been poor, and for the money they spent should have been far better.
* Lockdowns have been too leaky, and too late.
* But the vaccination research and rollout has been excellent.
The high UK death toll is only partly due to the above mediocrities, and mainly due to factors that cannot be pinned on the government:
* A very highly internationally mobile population that seeded infections everywhere in the country.
* A very highly internally mobile population that spread infections everywhere in the country.
* A very high density population
* Little experience of pandemic management and limited pre-existing testing capacity
* No culture of mask wearing
* A higher than average aged population
* A higher than average obese population
* Higher percentage of ethnic minority individuals who have been more susceptible to the disease, even after adjusting for health and income inequalities.
* More northerly climate with colder temperatures and higher rates of vitamin D deficiency
* Lower public tolerance for restrictions on movement
* Insufficient police numbers to enforce lockdown policies
No SINGLE cause from the lists above explain the UK's high death rate. It's a perfect storm of all of them.
The pandemic will not magically end because of a miracle cure, but with enough state capacity and social coordination crushing the thing would be possible right now.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/02/large-numb...
How many thousands die a year from the flu and it was all but ignored?
Which is my point... it was normal. Colds, flu, etc.
COVID? not going anywhere... its out and mutating... we'll eventually get used to it.
Wouldn't it be a shame if the window closed before the goals are reached? Also, I do not trust activist writers.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/great-reset-trudeau-poiliev...
So I think the death toll is just an abstraction to many. Others believe that there is no change in deaths and the government is just re-labelling them.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...:
> The selection of infectious diseases for eradication is based on rigorous criteria, as both biological and technical features determine whether a pathogenic organism is (at least potentially) eradicable. The targeted organism must not have a non-human reservoir (or, in the case of animal diseases, the infection reservoir must be an easily identifiable species, as in the case of rinderpest), and/or amplify in the environment. This implies that sufficient information on the life cycle and transmission dynamics is available at the time an eradication initiative is programmed. An efficient and practical intervention (such as a vaccine or antibiotic) must be available to interrupt transmission of the infective agent. Studies of measles in the pre-vaccination era led to the concept of the critical community size, the size of the population below which a pathogen ceases to circulate.[2] The use of vaccination programs before the introduction of an eradication campaign can reduce the susceptible population. The disease to be eradicated should be clearly identifiable, and an accurate diagnostic tool should exist. Economic considerations, as well as societal and political support and commitment, are other crucial factors that determine eradication feasibility.[3][4]
SARS-CoV-2 satisfies none of these pre-conditions (except for having a vaccine now). It is not only unrealistic but actively delusional/deleterious to argue for “COVID zero”. Don’t fall for it.
Remember herd immunity doesn’t mean eradication. The virus stays endemic. Which is fine; over the long run the set of all COVID-19-naive individuals becomes dominated by the very young (infants/toddlers), who have essentially zero risk of COVID-19 mortality.
It doesn’t make sense to argue “oh what if this virus magically evolves to hurt children”. You need to propose a theoretical mechanism of action. Otherwise spend your time worrying about flu and tuberculosis which kill far more children than COVID-19.
> over the long run the set of all COVID-19-naive individuals becomes dominated by the very young (infants/toddlers), who have essentially zero risk of COVID-19 mortality.
I really think you may not have ever read the literature on COVID-19 in children. We should be shouting at the rooftops that kids are safe (and btw transmit less than kids), instead here in California we’ve closed school for a year which will - in children - far surpass the harms of COVID-19 by orders of magnitude.
"Babies under 1 year old and children with certain underlying conditions may be more likely to have severe illness from COVID-19."
I wonder how many people supporting the sentiments of this article would be ok with someone arriving at their doorstep, taking you to a prison basically whether you agree or not, and quaranteening you there for at least 10 days with other covid people. Perhaps they also take your family too, in case they are also infected. Are you willing to pay that price?
People are going to be crossing borders at relatively few and well understood locations.
And they could've simply imposed large fines for anyone who tried to sneak through.
It’s a bit like saying New York should close its borders with Pennsylvania
This was already done and the infection rates are still sky high.
Lots of posters here seem convinced that being an island makes it easy to control covid. If thats the most important factor, I'd love to hear some theories on why the numbers in canada aren't coming down to 0, like they have in Australia and NZ?
The numbers are coming down (slowly) in Montreal now that they have a strict lockdown. I think the process could work; but at this point it might take so long to get the numbers under control that people wouldn't tolerate it. Especially not when the vaccine feels so close. We'd be talking like, 4 months in a row of strict lockdown + business closures.
The other aspect is contact tracing. When numbers are very low, its much easier to do diligent contact tracing around every infected person. In the recent outbreak in Sydney they tracked down and personally contacted everyone they could place in the vicinity of an infected person and asked them to self isolate. By the time a handful of those people tested positive, most of them had already been isolating and as a result didn't infect anyone - which broke the chain of transmission. We could do that because the number of new cases was only around ~10/day. That would be way less feasible at Montreal's 1600 cases/day.
Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-n...
Keep the (potentially) sick people on the "air side" of the airport terminal and then directly into quarantines on arrive at the final destination.
Those who bridge this gap (air crews, terminal staff) need to follow very strict measures (PPE, cleaning, regular testing) to make that work.
Perhaps more places need to decide they don't want to be a major transit hub during this pandemic? You know, restrict non-essential traffic a bit to make the essential traffic and local populace safer?
Well, if your country isn't a transit hub, then you avoid hub problems completely. If you are a hub, then you have additional problems that New Zealand doesn't, that you have to work to mitigate.
All of the European countries were able to implement border controls as the Schengen Borders Code permits.
They easily could have had a mandatory 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals and had a similar result to Australia and New Zealand. They chose instead to mimic themselves after Sweden and opted to contain rather than eliminate the virus. Even now Macron refuses to impose a lockdown.
Maybe the real difference is that we're an island. But much more likely is our different public policies. And if you need evidence, the UK is an island (like Aus/NZ) with policies more like the US and - surprise! They have case numbers more similar to the US than similar to Aus/NZ.
If you really think the island / continent thing is relevant, I'm excited to hear the story of why the US's covid disaster is somehow actually canada and mexico's fault.
Maybe it’s because they’re islands, and maybe you’re right and it’s because of the policy in place. I believe it’s the former, because it’s way more difficult to control influx of people in a connected economy like the EU for example.
It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
I'm convinced the most important difference is policy, but I wonder if there might be some psychological effect of living on an island all by yourself which makes you think "Well, can we just pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist?". Those thoughts might be harder to think in Europe.
> It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
I think Canada could drive covid down to zero by closing the US border, then enforcing strict lockdowns. (And apparently they have closed the border to the US.) I think the US or the UK could do the same if they wanted at a national level. Well, at least in theory. I acknowledge it would be much more difficult to do the same in a small european nation. At least, it would be difficult to do it alone.
However, bear in mind that Europe has become super interconnected in the last decade or so. There are millions crossing borders to work on the other side. Germany is a great example. Those counties close to the Czech border had way higher incidence levels, most probably due to the constant exchange with Czech Republic.
But you aren't in this alone. If Europe worked together, and your neighbors adopted similar policies it would have worked fine and covid would be under control by now.
The fact that you aren't on an island doesn't excuse the EU's bad covid policy decisions, at both the scale of individual countries and as a collective body.
This is exactly what Western Australia did. The Australian response was not nationally coordinated and each state has been doing their own thing. They have land borders between each other and yet the Victorian outbreak didn't spread to either NSW or SA because they implemented border checks by lining the roads with police and fining people who attempted to circumvent them, while WA implemented a hard border even earlier as soon as there was a non-zero number of cases.
The Australian states are geographically larger than many European countries, so I don't think it's that it's an island. The only effect nationally was hotel quarantine for arriving flights which is possible for landlocked countries as well.
It shouldn't also be noted that the borders don't have to be hermetically sealed. As long as cross border contamination is minimized other tools (contact tracing) can deal with it.
Europe has a lot more people living in much less space and much more integrated than isolated places with so much land like New Zealand and Australia.
> 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals
This would grind EU to a halt. Tourism alone results in 750 million international tourists visiting EU a year. Counting travels of EU citizens between EU countries would result in billions.
Sure, island countries the population size of Croatia and Romania maybe can isolate. EU as a whole? Pfff
This effectively reads "closed."
But yes, tourism or business trips are now infeasible. Fortunately it turns out that they were never essential.
HN user doesn’t see the need for something, therefore it must not be essential.
It will not.
I am tired of wearing the god damn masks, having to worry about my elderly parents,
Are you tired of the god damn pandemic? I know I am. Because we already have no freedom.
So, I would argue that you don’t have to wear a mask now because of the pandemic, you choose to wear one despite a lack of scientific evidence (or are mandated to wear one of course).
SARS-2 is a zoonotic, endemic respiratory virus. If you’re tired of it, you need to accept that it’s here to stay and realize that we can’t put life on hold indefinitely and trigger a global food shortage that will end up eclipsing COVID-19 deaths anyway (oops).
Anyway, it is your right to decide that you would like totalitarian measures enacted upon you and your family. But you shouldn’t be able to make that decision for me, and unfortunately your “side” has already won and enacted [a half-assed version of] those very failed policies that you continue to venerate across most of the globe.
If people put risk in perspective the average person would be less (or equally) afraid of COVID-19 personally than the flu, and your average elderly person would be 5-10x as afraid as the flu but not the current level of fear (feels like 100x IMO). Oh, and schools would be open worldwide with no masks nor social distancing because children are rarely harmed by COVID-19 and are frequently harmed by lockdown measures.
[/ramble]
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...
https://fullfact.org/health/evidence-shows-masks-do-offer-pr...
Please stop perpetuating this myth that masks don't work all because you just don't like wearing one.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/
Linking me a bunch of public health websites isn’t convincing because these organizations don’t actually maintain epistemiological rigor, they just parrot whatever the dogma is.
The only RCT of masking for COVID-19 ever performed showed an insignificant benefit in terms of self-infection at best.
Meanwhile studies in HCW can’t rule out cloth masks causing bacterial pneumonia and increased self-infection.
And it's not "self-infection" that masking is a protection of. Nobody has claimed that. You wear a mask to protect those around you, and they wear their's to protect you.
Though it figures you are obsessed with the self and have no regard for the other.
You need to provide affirmative evidence before undertaking societal interventions with guaranteed negative impact. Does the hippocratic oath ring a bell?
For me the most annoying thing is the idea that lockdown is somehow "saving" lives. People who are dying from COVID would have died from something else 2-3 years from now. These are old, sick people, whose lives are (mostly) behind them.
If I was an 80 yo and my grand-kids were put in prison to allow me to live a couple more years, I would be even more angry than I am right now.
It doesn't. No amount of hiding temporarily solves the problem. Authoritarian rules would be in effect until immunity rates are above herd thresholds at a minimum. There is no "one month" shutdown in the US or a connected EU country that solves the problem permanently unless you ban international travelers / force them to quarantine for 14 days in a hotel.
Thats the sticking point for you? Who cares about international travellers. They can wait, and visit when covid is over.
Well, that for you are ordinary people (govts just echo their sentiments). They will enslave you for their benefit ( real or imaginary). They will take away your freedom under the guise of concern for your health.
CCP is known to misinform with less at stake than this, and to not care all that much about large areas of rural territory (recall the one child policy, which was more or less unenforced outside of larger cities and resulted in the depressing phenomenon of millions of “invisible” children who are outside of the system and do not have access to education or healthcare). With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the virus has been raging over the countryside, unreported.
That is not to say I know one way or the other, but merely to point out that relying on official information may not be correct—one ought to look at secondary signs, such as new hospitals being built or some inconsistencies in numbers. Claiming that centralized measures helped get the virus under control based on official numbers from a totalitarian regime may be disingenuous.
On top of that there's plenty of foreign reporters there, and plenty of foreign diplomats who would also notice.
Those policies sound even more strict than what we've been doing in Australia, and we had 2 weeks with 0 locally transmitted cases. With procedures like that it makes sense they have covid under control.
(The times when news got out.)
The ability of Chinese authorities to suppress the information domestically (again, recent crackdowns on using social media for self-journalism), as well as to influence Western sources, shouldn’t be underestimated. I wouldn’t mind listening to that podcast though.
I know about COVID test results required for travel, but I don’t take it as much of an indicator if you consider people outside major cities who do not travel much (especially now that there’s an extra barrier to it) and may just suffer from virus outbreaks in localized clusters where they live.
Either way, what we don’t have is reliable numbers of how many people were tested, and how many of them were positive, across China.
- Stay home. The only allowed reasons to leave our homes were essential supplies (eg visiting the supermarket), caring for family, going to work (if you couldn't work from home) or exercise (eg going for a walk). Or if you needed medical care.
- Unless we had a really good reason, we had to stay within a 5km radius of home at all times, and couldn't leave home for more than 1hr each day. We also had an 8pm curfew - though I'm still not sure what that was for.
- No visitors unless they're an intimate partner
- Masks mandatory any time you left your home. On the spot fines from police if they catch you outside without a mask.
Basically everything indoors was closed - no gyms, takeout only at restaurants, etc. Supermarkets had security guards to make sure nobody entered without a mask on, and they had complimentary hand sanitizer at the entrance.
That strategy was enough to go from 700/day down to 0/day in a couple months. Those months were awful, but just about everything has opened up again now since we've been sitting at 0 local infections in the whole country for the last few weeks. We only broke our streak today - a hotel quarantine worker was infected in Perth. The city has immediately locked down to make sure it doesn't spread.
If the whole world followed the same strategy, covid would be gone already and international travel could have resumed months ago.
Because of the incubation period, covid numbers are effectively delayed 2 weeks. That is to say, there's a 2 week delay between the time your government changes policies and when you see the effect of those policies on covid case numbers. It took us awhile too - after they brought the lockdown into effect our numbers kept going up for awhile - which was terrifying. But the numbers trended down eventually.
Looks like the policy is working and you'll hit 0 if you keep it up for a few more months. Why are you stopping?
The United States can't stop illegal immigration and cross-border state travel with or without a pandemic. The laws and expectations are significantly different in connected regions like the US and EU compared to a singular island nation.
They could've easily continued that and added mandatory hotel quarantine.
Just like now with Macron they instead prefer to choose populism instead of tough, early, decisive action.
Being an island has nothing to do with it. The difference is due to different health policies.
- We had mandatory masks in all public places here in Melbourne with on the spot fines by police. Over in the US lots of people thought covid is a hoax, and even your president refused to wear a mask.
- Australia declared mass gatherings to be illegal - it went through the courts and the judges decided public safety trumped a citizen's rights to protest during the pandemic. Germany's courts ruled in the opposite direction for an anti-mask protest. And meanwhile the US had BLM protests for months, presidential rallies and the capital hill riot.
And so on. These differences have nothing to do with sharing your continent with Canada and Mexico. They have everything to do with culture and public policy.
Exactly. I live in Washington State and even now, one major party in our Legislature is trying to get at least three bills through that would declare "Emperor" (language not used in the bill, but definitely on Twitter) Inslee's emergency orders, including the mask mandate, void and tell everyone to do what they think best. Which, fine, except for the whole community transmission and insisting on businesses be open--with those employees being told "work or starve"--things.
We've been hearing for many months that masks are required and must be worn and put them on and yet...everyone disclaims all responsibility for enforcing this. I don't blame retail employees from saying "we do not want to be on the other end of a screaming patron in exchange for minimum wage," but when even the government tells us that they're relying solely on people's discretion and good sense, things fall flat. I'm not saying arrest everyone who has their nose hanging atop a mask, that would be disproportionately unwise, but we absolutely can and should be having people in authority out day and night at shops, buses, parks, ferries, and so on reminding people that your nose goes under your mask.
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/coronavirus/index-of-covid-...
And it sounds like that is based on official statistics, which the Mexican government has admitted is way off.
It isn't completely irrelevent that the US shares a border with another country that has done horribly badly at managing the pandemic.
Shouldn't it be the courts who issue fines?
edit: also, I thought our pretense for harassing prostitutes was to stop the spread of disease. If we don't actually care about disease we should stop harassing them so they can have have a few years of freedom from interference before a strain of covid mutates into the death rate of MERS and civilization falls because we can't live like the awful Chinese.
What seems to have worked in Wuhan was, in addition to lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing and isolation of symptomatic patients and their close contacts in centralized quarantine facilities.
Once all of this is done, I hope we learn more about how China actually contained this. But the answer is likely authoritarian measures that no democracy can legally or politically afford.
We actually wiped out an entire industry of mink farming in the name of stopping the spread of mutations, but that is a topic for an other thread (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/health/covid-mink-mutatio...).
(Disclosure: I also think the same for the human lockdowns too though)
Melbourne, Australia had a 4-month lockdown which turned an exponentially-rising 500+ cases a day scenario into elimination. Saving thousands of lives.
No other place has managed to do something similar and it shows hotel quarantine of foreign arrivals, aggressive contact-tracing, mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing and lockdowns work. The Swedish laissez-faire approach does not.
I recommend looking at the Victoria section of that page, as Victoria had by far the largest outbreak to cope with.
For a more high-level overview, I like the BBC’s article, which talks about their opinions on the most important steps taken by the government, as well as the most critical mistakes. Note that it dates to October of last year and so doesn’t include mention of the three cases which induced a brief tightening of lockdown for a few weeks after the article was published.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Australia
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54654646
This is not true. Hard lockdown that people follow seems to work. But lowdown only doesn't work.
1. Not all lockdown are equal, look at Germany how long they have a been in a soft lockdown so that death can decrease? like 2 months? Not sure at this point this is due to lockdown
2. If people don't follow the order it doesn't work, Peru one of the toughest and longest lockdown but yet also the highest mortality in the world
Large fines, arrests publicised on television and a strong police presence across the cities ensured that people weren't given the choice about to whether to comply or not. Now does it introduce questions about whether people's civil liberties were infringed ? Absolutely. But it works.
As a fellow Melbournite I will clarify: Real lockdowns work. End of story.
Most people cannot make money while locked down. Who pays their bills? Are they expected to burn through all savings to become destitute enough to qualify for aid? Are landlords and mortgage holders supposed to deal without any revenue?
Is caging up your citizens to avoid a disease that has a miniscule chance of death (for all but its oldest citizens) really necessary? Is it ok to saddle future generations with government debt to pay for these lockdowns?
There are many “stories” to tell here.
Lockdowns do work, technically speaking, but not in the long-run. Virus doesn't care and will operate as usual, albeit at slower rate. Persistent things those viruses are.
Lockdowns make sense only at the beginning of a pandemic and their only sane purpose is to give the health care segment to prepare itself for the hit. Beyond that it's a lost cause. You're not saving thousands of lives, you're just extending the inevitable further down in the future, while your economy is sinking, which will create even more problems down the road.
So even if you stay inside the cave forever, the bear will still come.
2. Lockdowns occurred during winter.
3. Australia has effectively eliminated COVID-19 and by having so few cases it allows for targeted lockdowns to work over the long-term e.g. Perth just had 1 case today and is having a short 5-day lockdown - their first in 10 months.
Sidney - 423/km2 Melbourne - 508/km2 Brisbane - 155/km2
Paris - 20,000/km2 Berlin - 4,206/km2 London - 5,666/km2 NYC - 27,755/km2
You are effectively out of touch with reality.
edit:
NYC - 27,755/km2 to NYC - 10,716/km2 (27,755 is in mi2 units)
sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brisbane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin
If we’re talking just about Melbourne’s CBD (which might be a sensible thing to do seeing as we’re talking about people being clustered in the cities and not about the surrounding suburbs, national parks, and rural areas which presumably are included in your “Melbourne” number), then the actual number for Melbourne is around 19,000 people/km2 [1], which is at least in the ballpark of the numbers you’ve given for other major cities. Although again, you don’t give enough details to know specifically what those numbers actually mean.
[1]: https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/theres-a-reas...
We're talking about the cities as a whole, not selectively for this or that neighborhood, or that particular bus.
Would those measures work in similarly-high-density cities? The awkward fact is that most of the cases in greater Melbourne were outside the densely-populated CBD [2], that much of the transmission occurred in lower-paid (McDonalds) and less-safe (meatpacking) workplaces, people whose home language was not English, as well as in shared living conditions.
There’s a temptation to fit the data to the narrative you want, but (as far as I’m aware) the data you’d need to pick any one of these factors as conclusive hasn’t been released. Gestures in the direction of geography as the _one thing_ that enabled elimination are silly and ignore the vast amount of effort and personal sacrifice and organisation and argument and collaboration that went into that result.
Lockdowns do work — even if that’s not quite the end of the story.
[0] https://theconversation.com/where-did-victoria-go-so-wrong-w... [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-14/victoria-coronavirus-... [2] https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/20...
Heretic view - there is no new virus to start with. Some places seem to have declared zero flu cases this year. Go figure.
I don't see how most of the EU countries can follow this strategy. Germany für example has porous borders with Denmark, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech republic, Poland. If they don't in turn all follow this strategy we'd have to militarily secure all these borders and stop anybody from going through. This would cause an enormous hit to the economies and cost a lot of money in military gear and personnel to execute.
Now for the next scenario, say the whole EU + Switzerland + UK decide to follow zero Covid. Then we still have a boatable connection to Africa and a pretty large land border with Asia to defend. Despite the never before seen political coordination this would need, this would create very harsh humanitarian situations along those borders, even worse than what we've seen in recent years.
So all in all I don't think it's that easy to use island nation strategies for mostly land locked nations.
That’s just one of Australia’s states, and we were the only state with a severe lockdown like this. We have massive land borders with South Australia and New South Wales.
But also, having lived in both countries for more than 20 years each (including being in Melbourne now and throughout the lockdowns), I can’t imagine a country like the US ever engaging in a lockdown, or it working if they tried. It just doesn’t match their national role models of how people are supposed to act and what they’re supposed to care about.
The whole defining ideal here in Australia is “mateship”. As you’re growing up, the revered role model that you’re told you should emulate is the “good mate”; being compassionate, taking people as they are, taking care of each other. That’s what they tell each other it means to be Australian.
The equivalent mythic figure at the center of US society is the cowboy. It’s all about rugged individualism over there. And sure you take pains to protect your own family, but certainly not anybody else’s. Anything which requires one to take an ounce of inconvenience to help the society as a whole, that’s just not what Americans are generally raised to value. Those other folks ought to be taking care of their own families, after all. So you’ve got a whole society of people where the majority say “I’m not going to wear a mask if it mostly protects you.” And you’re certainly not going to convince a large enough percentage of people to obey a mandate as inconvenient as a requirement to stay inside their house for months at a time for it to be effective. They just won’t do it.
I don’t know what realistic options they have in the US. I hope they find one. It’s indisputable that lockdowns do work if followed.. but it’s also true that the US will never be able to make the majority of their population comply with one. It just doesn’t fit the country’s stories about themselves.
EDIT: In the above, I make a bunch of sweeping generalisations about huge populations of people, and I’m obviously not saying that everyone in those populations think those ways. I’m just pointing out the difference in what America says being American is about, and what Australia says being Australian is about.
Morally, raising mink for fur is equal to eating meat or consuming dairy products.
Meat and dairy products feed humans, which is a necessity (that, in our day and age, may or may not be achieved by other means while still maintaining a healthy diet), while fur is a luxury product - by no means necessary. It isn't even a byproduct, the fur is the sole reasons the minks are killed.
I can't even fathom how you can see these two things in the same light, morally.
Clothing is a necessity, but fur is just one way to meet that necessity. There's a number of natural and synthetic substitutes that can accomplish the same goals (avoiding nudity when it would be considered immoral, staying warm in cold climates, etc)
What's the difference? Is fur just worse because it serves as a status symbol in addition to the practical purposes?
Maybe not relevant for mink vs cow farming, but in some situations I think killing animals for their fur is morally and environmentally superior to raising and killing animals for their meat. Louisiana nutria bounty program is a net positive for the native ecology, which I don't think could be said for most meat products.
Yeah, it’s easy to be against it and feel good about yourself without making a sacrifice in your life. Wear fur and eat meat folks, but stop with logical inconsistencies!
Then you extend that to humans, so now nothing matters.
This is not very helpful.
As cruel as Corona itself is - it did bring a few good things, killing the Mink industry was definitely one of them in my opinion.
“He finds it astonishing that COVID-19 has boosted its infectiousness by 30 to 50 per cent over previous strains by doing what viruses do: evolve, mutate and adapt for more effective reproduction.”
The UK strain seems to be 25% more infectious. It’s still bad but less than mentioned.
EDIT: source is the latest Drosten podcast, where he referenced to some new evidence and papers. Here’s the transcript (in German), see page 9 bottom.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript262.pdf
The UK variant which will be the dominant strain in the USA in a couple months is more deadly, and I believe the same is true for the South Africa version. Both more infectious, and both more lethal.
That's not what is in the article. It says "“there is a realistic possibility that infection with” the country’s dominant Covid-19 variant “is associated with an increased risk of death compared to infection with” other strains of the coronavirus."
What they are saying is basically "we do not know".
Think of two kinds of fires burning at different levels of a forest. The lethality could even go down, transmission rates could go up and still kill more people.
There are still children and people who can’t tolerate a vaccine, but vaccinating 6.5M out of 8.5M people quickly (assuming 2M children and 800k that have or soon will catch COVID) should have a huge effect on the r rate.
I don't see that being anywhere near politically acceptable in many areas of the country.
A closure order + heavy fines/penalties + economic support would work, along with clear messaging around goals and exit criteria.
This! The lack of clear exit criteria and the continous moving of goalposts convinced me that the pandemic is used as a vehicle for a political agenda and even if it mutated into a mild cough politicians would still try to keep the hysteria alive, at least in the EU and Canada.
I imagine this only being in the heart of cities.
The lack of traffic leads to a reduction in crime generally, freeing up police oversight required to keep a lid on that.
Oh my god, that sounds horrible - except, that's how EVERY infectious disease works. We have been living with that kind of diseases forever.
Also, no, they don't grow exponentially. The population saturates.
The New Zealand or Taiwan model works because you don't let the virus enter in the first place.
Also New Zealand and Australia are in Summer right now. Just 30 seconds of Australia sun radiation now will kill(inactivate) any virus on any surface. Temperature will dry the membrane of any COVID virus that remains on the shadow. People immune system is much stronger in Summer, and people go out, do not live that close together as in Winter.
Once you let it enter like the UK, Spain, Italy or US did, it is too late.
It took three months for the Spain going "from 1 to 0", and it was the biggest catastrophe for the economy and democracy itself in decades, because it takes time for the spread to halve. And it did not get a real 0 after all the pain. Spanish' Spring and Summer had probably the biggest effect after all.
It is not that catastrophic by the way. Once people get infected, they do not get infected away, and just protecting people over 65 years old with vaccine will stop most deads.
In fact just going for people over 80 years old have a significant effect on deads.
In the US, 15% of the population is over 65 years old and 9% already got the first dose. Next month most of them will be immune.
I think that this option is far far better than being in "half measures" restrictions for very long periods of time.
When a country announces their lock-down measures I feel excited for their populace that they might finally be heading to zero.
Then I read the holes in the measures:
- Resturants open, even if only for takeout.
- People mixing bubbles with friends
- Working from an office when WFH is possible
- Anything beyond food, health and utilities being considered "essential" and allowed
- Lack of financial support so it is not financially feasible to take public health measures (stay home, feed family, get tested, get healthcare).
I can't wait for other countries to simply copy the New Zealand quarantine rules and institute an Alert level 4 lockdown, not some half-hearted level 3 / 2 ripoff.
Ask for level 4: https://covid19.govt.nz/assets/resources/tables/COVID-19-ale...
When all the citizens are in this together, when they all see the shared sacrifice and they have the means to actually take a lock-down together ... it's a huge weight off. It would only take 6 weeks of true level 4 to transform the infection rate of any nation - the virus dies out if it cannot spread.
When the United States of America can relocate to an island and near-permanently ban travel into the country like NZ has, we'll do that, I guess.
EDIT: Ah yes, HN the libertarian paradise unless it's about COVID, then the recommendations are non-practical authoritarian measures and citing island nation success and hurling downvotes. Keep them coming.
Why are the countries consistently being cited for doing good jobs in this thread seem to be island nations? Exclude AUS and NZ from the analysis and there are very few landlocked countries doing a good job without very authoritarian measures that are unlikely to be legal in the countries doing poorly.
The UK could have also succeeded but the government didn't have the will to even try early on. Now they are only willing to take half measures.
Also, we DID (NZ, AUZ) have a small advantage since we had less inbound infected for a few weeks early on due to distance. But then again, other nations (US, UK, ...) didn't even try to pursue an elimination strategy.
Also, I bet that when "the public demanded" it was a loud and public minority who wanted travel (and Covid-19) back.
Because these are western english speaking nations with a similar culture that have people posting on HN.
- Shut down the highway off-ramps into towns with some sort of inter-state quarantine scheme (make this legal)
- Institute financial support for all non-essential businesses, then force them to close (cease in person trading) during lock-down
- Educate the populace on Covid details
It's not just about strong walls or deep oceans. We're not talking about a zombie apocalypse here. Stop making excuses.
"Make this legal" is a pretty hand-wavy way to say that it isn't legal and isn't likely to become legal. Restricting interstate travel is going to be very difficult to both achieve and to survive federal court challenges.
Some toolkits are not available to some countries. The United States is unlikely to be able to effectively use the authoritarian measures other countries have used.
Pointing this out gets mass downvotes on HN which is a typical libertarian paradise, but when it comes to COVID, is all about authoritarian measures to get it done. I'd be fine with them too if they were at all practical in this country, but they aren't.
Such a barrier is only really essential when different states have different rules. If you could get all states to agree on a lock-down it would go a long way. You might be able to set up quarantine barriers as you exit the interstate? I don't know.
Personally, I think it is terms like "libertarian paradise" which lead to down-votes. Talk about the issues, not some made up catch all names like "libertarian"
Interstate commerce clause is going to be nearly impossible to subvert in courts, much less state autonomy, and non-cooperating governors (primarily Republican, I'm sure, but Gov. Polis likely wouldn't go for it either).
>> Talk about the issues, not some made up catch all names like "libertarian"
My comment was downvoted -3 before I even mentioned the word "libertarian." COVID has a way of bringing out the authoritarians in HN.
I am not either. I see the value in authoritarian measures, I really do. I also realize they won't work in the US because of both compliance and lack of legal purchase.
This is from a country that fought the British Empire, helped turn the tide in WW2, put a man on the moon, and made many scientific and technical achievements in the 20th century. But somehow, now, we can't seem to accomplish anything.
Australia, NZ and the other countries that have succeeded have a pro-social culture of collective effort.
The US, and increasingly Canada as well, do not - they have an “everyone for themselves” culture.
In the end if people are not going to follow the rules it won’t matter what you try to do - you will fail. In the US and Canada people only halfheartedly follow the rules when the situation is grim, the ERs are filled and freezer trucks parked in the hospital parking lot.
Florida has free tests. I tried two places (giant parks filled with hundreds of cars waiting), the cops told me 3+ hours wait each, I went to a private clinic and was done in 20 min. But yeah, they have free and fully subsidized tests.
Apparently the logistics of it is not that simple.
Kind of no point having the population get tested now in the US. Without contact tracing and quarantine a positive result arrives too late to help anyone.
First you need to lock down the entire state until the daily infected is only 1% of the testing capacity. 4 weeks of level 4 lock-down would do that. Then with contact-tracing you can start to get ahead of the virus by quarantining infected people (close contacts of the positive test) before they even transmit Covid further.
Also, I'm sorry that you are experiencing life in a state as infected as Florida. It sounds terrifying. I hope you get well soon and stay safe.
The former is a logistical nightmare in a collection of states that basically is not possible to carry out due to our incompetent government and the scale of international travel in the US being several orders of magnitude higher than Vietnam's per capita (and gross rates of course) and the latter won't work (and hasn't worked when we tried it) because our population is inherently distrustful of our government(s) and generally have the right to be that way.
Again, not all tools smaller countries have are available to larger ones, and vice versa (America/EU/etc have better access to vaccines as a plus, for example).
Apart from sectors like tourism, there wasn't anyone who truly felt "screwed over" by arbitrary rules.
Sharing a land border with Victoria did not make it impossible for New South Wales or Victoria to get back to zero - and that's states, not countries, so the extent of the border infrastructure is a few "Welcome to Victoria" signs.
It isn't a choice of Health vs Economy, it's Health for Economy
Not that I disagree with your points, they should be the baseline for any serious covid response. Lockdown measures have so far always been watered down by politicians due to pressures from business. Business is this time acting staggeringly idiotically, prolonging the situation due to fear of complete shutdown. At the end, they get hurt much more.
Some local info - Swiss are faring quite well, while not having that many things closed, ie ski resorts work (since its outdoor activity). Not restricting traveling within country. France on the other hand is going again mental (liberté has long abandoned the place of revolution, but that's happen when you go extreme left in real world). Closing many basic things, but ie annual sales in shopping centres were going very strong till today.
I mean how fucking stupid you can be, close outdoor business giving salaries to significant part of population, and on the other side allowing large indoor gatherings of people so they can buy cheap clothes and stores can clean their stock. Even now they only close those > 20,000m2 surface.
Outdoor activities also keep many people sane and in good health, which at this point is becoming significant negative side effect of this whole situation. Most people I know, including myself, the fitness level declined in last year. That is tightly coupled with mental health. At least spring will fix things up a bit (looking forward to run in the park again, more sun, less rain).
In addition, virtually everyone got behind the lockdown and made it work together- this is nothing to do with geography and all to do with good leadership, and a strong society.
This ensured that the right people had the right terminology when a nationwide mobilization was required.
https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/healthy-living/emerge...
So then, if you’re stuck in shades of gray, you have to weigh the antiviral benefits of the lockdown with just keeping the lights out. That’s a tough one to balance.
Kudos to New Zealand, I’m just not sure it’s a blueprint others can replicate.
On return home, they need to assume they became infected en-route and use PPE suitable for that reality.
Medical staff already know how to avoid taking disease home. They just need the funding and support to access the right PPE, facilites and reasonable hours. If they are in transit, the need a good reason and well thought out measures.
Quarantines don't need to stop all people, just those who are likely to spread the disease.
More generally, these rules are all nice and well, but unless you are you going to give every person his or her own policeman to make sure that they follow them, people will keep stretching, bending and breaking the rules - of course, some (maybe even most?) behave responsibly, but the virus only needs a few who don't...
Of course this is not working under the current way of how EU works, but I think this is the only pragmatic solution as response to such crisis.
Massive centralized control never ends well.
You’re close to the insight here though: there is a pragmatic solution, and it’s to stop waging war against an endemic respiratory virus of zoonotic origin. It’s like struggling in quicksand; trying to escape just makes it worse. That’s real pragmatism.
A small anecdotal example of why this complicates fighting the pandemic: during the first wave, eastern Germany got off relatively easy, with few cases. Czechia was even better, because they locked their borders and hardly had any cases initially. Then, during the summer/early autumn, Germany had the usual rules with masks, distancing, no large gatherings etc., while Czechia had much laxer/less-enforced rules. So guys from Germany would throw their bachelor party in Czechia, get infected and then infect everyone at their wedding a few days later. Which led not only to Czechia having a catastrophic number of cases in October, but also to eastern Germany (particularly Saxony) being hardest hit in the second wave.
Rather they’re pointing out the obvious: if you’re trying to get to zero COVID, all it takes is one person to start the chain. Thus you cannot have ANY illegal immigration.
FWIW I strongly oppose the “zero COVID” goal because it’s completely unrealistic. We’ll see if the island nations can maintain it long-term but certainly in the US it’s a non-starter.
Sure, we'd have to actually do something, but it would take less resources than we are expending on medical care, for instance.
The countries with low infection levels don't need to maintain it for all that much longer, we have effective vaccines. Probably 6 months (At which point they will likely have vaccinated much of their populations).
That's the thing you change.
The basic problem i see with "Get to Zero" is that it's an extreme position, and politicians always tend to find a compromise in everything they do. So unless you can get everyone to agree to this goal, it's simply not realistic in a democracy, regardless of the scientific merit.
Coronaviruses mutate, and every single infected human becomes a petri dish for new mutations. The rest is straightforward natural selection: the most efficient covid-19 variants will win. We might get lucky; the most efficient variant might accidentally mutate away all the things that makes it deadly to humans. There might even be some selection pressure for that.
But it could also stay about as deadly while changing enough about its spike protein to defeat antibodies in previously infected individuals and get more infectious in the process, and that would be a really bad scenario.
I've been stunned for the last 12 months at the volume of the people that are totally okay with this, since we have no way of knowing right now how this might turn out over the next few years.
I'm 25. I've spent the last year in a small apartment alone with my dog. If the problem is that we didn't lock down well enough the first time, why should I believe a better job will be done this time?
If the CDC says it, I'll do it. But I'm tired of reading "science writers" constantly shitting on the situation. Really makes me wonder why I bothered in the first place.
I thought "American science has given us a Lamborghini when what the world needs is a Toyota" was a particular gem in this piece. I could swear six months to a year ago I was reading people like this guy saying we shouldn't expect a vaccine to be discovered soon, if ever.
Here in Australia we tried asking people who were infected to just quarantine in their own homes. Eventually the police went around and started doing spot checks, and found that a bunch of people who had known positive covid tests had gone in to work! No no no - you need strict enforcement to go along with lockdown rules or it just doesn't seem to work.
~ Thomas Jefferson
> American science has given us a Lamborghini when what the world needs is a Toyota
There is no Pfizer vaccine ... it's German science from Biontech. The author doesn't even get this detail right. Why should I take his panicky opinion serious?
> They actually represent an entirely new pandemic.
This is semantics abused for FUD. It's not a new pandemic - period.
> And by New Zealand’s or Taiwan’s measure, we look very bad.
Did it even occur to this guy that his favorite reference countries are small islands with basically just one major ship and airport?
> Be like a zero hero, like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern.
This whole text is just a cheesy opinion piece - not a scientific view.
> No politician wanted to hear that evidence [by Drosten], and many continue to ignore it.
Not true - he's been the court scientist of German government since early 2020.
These countries are all islands. How is that representative of the rest of the world and how they can handle it?
San Francisco, where I'm told (and believe, based on having lived there) that they had very strict lockdown measures:
https://www.sfdph.org/dph/alerts/coronavirus.asp
* Population: ~900,000
* Total Cases: 31,111 (3,457 / 100k)
* Total Deaths: 324 (36 / 100k)
Compare Austin, TX, where I can personally attest that basically everyone has said fuck the rules for almost six months now
https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#...
* Population: ~2,400,000
* Total Cases: 68,290 (2,845 / 100k)
* Total Deaths: 655 (27 / 100k)
The stats are virtually identical despite dramatically different policy decisions. So what the hell is the point?
As an addendum, to put this into perspective: in 2020, Oakland's murder rate was 23/100k, making it _almost as high as the covid death rate_. Why is it that one year of covid deaths is a world-destroying incident, but _every_ year of Oakland deaths and nobody does anything about it ever? Are Bay Area people really just that racist?
But, and this is the terrible part, the murder happens to "the poors". So, IMO,, it's less about racism and more about classism (possibly rooted in racism).
It's similar to how we (usa) don't care too much about the covid deaths. It's like Earthican tradition for disease and pestilence to affect poor folks first/more and for the wealthy to just not see it (they simply look the other way).
SF also has density issues that will drive up the r0 of the virus. While the widely quoted r0 of the virus is around 3.0, the r0 in NYC at the start of the outbreak was estimated to be 5.0
(You could argue about if that was really the r(t) and not r0, but I'm not considering time-dependence or the reaction to the virus, but the actual starting reproduction number in NYC before there was any human reaction to the virus -- that isn't a constant value but depends on the local conditions).
Austin has an overall 3,000 people per square mile density, SF has an overall 18,000 people per square mile (and some areas are even more dense than that).
Moreover lockdown restrictions were removed when numbers of new cases simply lowered, as opposed to all known cases being removed from community and quarantined, and confidence there was zero community transmission.
Meanwhile borders are porous, with new cases arriving constantly. The combination of all this is heartbreakingly difficult to observe.
Honestly this stuff is easy.
A lockdown means only essential workers who actually keep the lights on and provide food go to work, and they do with ridiculous protection.
It means no fast food delivery, no public transport or Ubers, no leaving your residence except for exercise (maybe - some places you had to stay inside) and 1/week shop at the supermarket (or delivery) with one person/household.
It means closing the borders firmly, and government-provided and provisioned (not outsourced) quarantining every arrival for at least 14 days.
And it means providing plenty of funding and kindness to businesses and people to allow them to get through without fear. Including putting homeless into homes (e.g. empty hotel rooms).
And it needs to last long enough to know and isolate every case, which is say 6-8 weeks if done properly.
The US and UK failed on every one of these tests, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead.
Meanwhile in New Zealand we did the above almost a year ago, and are enjoying our summer break essentially normally.
Good luck doing that in a country of 320mil with no internal border infrastructure or legal framework whatsoever, and a huge land-based border.
That said, even if it were possible, I'd take liberty over safety (from a vastly overblown hazard by all estimates) in this case; really grateful to an American for this crisis.
Sucks to live where you do. :-^