Does Norway handle this differently?
As far as tourism is concerned, the government has divided European countries into two groups: traveling from "red" countries requires a mandatory quarantine upon entry, traveling from a "green" country does not mandate a quarantine. AFAIK all non-European countries are considered "red", meaning quarantine on entry.
[1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/rajivs-fru-stopp... (Swedish)
One of my key takeaways from this experience is that I wish someone besides Facebook was making relatively inexpensive, easy-to-use home video portals that can follow you around a room.
I do not understand why you think that one specific demographic is being targeted here, as lockdowns typically affect every demographic <sic> within a region.
My heart (and renal, neural, respiratory etc systems) all very much need some brutal lockdowns for a few solid weeks, followed by very careful and complete contact tracing with significant penalties for people who intentionally try to circumvent these measures.
Perhaps you could mention where you and your loved one are.
The more people feel like they're a special-case snowflakes who should be exempt from travelling restrictions, the longer this situation is going to last.
You may be reasonably comfortable in your situation (as much as this entire situation gets, anyway) but not everyone is so lucky. This is not "special-case snowflakes", just a recognition that people, their circumstances, and experiences greatly differ. I'd argue that almost everyone gets treated "special" at some points in their lives and rightfully so. Always treating everyone the same is deeply misguided as people are simply not the same (equality shouldn't mean "one size fits all for everyone").
Merely travelling wouldn't cause a "chain of deaths", when done with with appropriate precautions and care. That's an extremely wild and panicked exaggeration, and not based on what we know.
Besides, I'm not entirely sure what you're exactly proposing to achieve with your "hard lockdown"; it's already well established that the virus is impossible to contain, and in many ways a "hard lockdown" will make it worse. There needs to be some balance.
There's countless examples of people all over the world not taking appropriate precautions and care when dealing with Covid. I think it's pretty obvious that you cannot trust everyone to do the right thing, and indeed there's enough people not doing the right thing for it to cause major problems.
Additionally, note that the current outbreak in Melbourne - 12500 cases, and 175 deaths (and counting) - can be traced back to a handful (i.e. 1-3) initial outbreaks due to lapses in quarantine protocols. It is absolutely, demonstrably true that individuals can cause a 'chain of deaths'. Individaul leaked cases through a lockdown can cause an explosion of cases to spiral out of control if allowed to get any traction. I would not call that wild or panicked exaggeration at all, and is most definitely based on what we know.
Lastly, it's very obviously false to claim that a hard lockdown cannot help, see New Zealand as a shining counter-example. Extremely aggressive lockdowns and widespread testing can indeed control it.
"Can" is not the same as "will". I already said "when done with with appropriate precautions and care" in my previous comment.
The thing is, just because there are some Oz bogans returning from their coma drinking holiday in Bali acted in an idiotic fashion doesn't mean we should prevent everyone else on the planet from travelling at all, no matter the personal circumstances. Lockdowns also cause real harm, see e.g. [1], although the full effects won't be known for certain with time.
"There's enough people not doing the right thing for it to cause major problems" with many things: cars, guns, knives, etc. It's always a matter of balancing different interests and trade-offs.
> Lastly, it's very obviously false to claim that a hard lockdown cannot help, see New Zealand as a shining counter-example. Extremely aggressive lockdowns and widespread testing can indeed control it.
That's not exactly that I said either. What is your long-term plan with this? Institute a draconic hard lockdown every time there is a single case? It doesn't seem that any of this is just going to disappear from the world any time soon, if ever. It's not a solution, just a stop-gap measure (which is what people have been saying pretty much from the get-go).
The real question is what will happen in 6 months, a year, or 2 years time with New Zealand. Remember, we've managed to eradicate exactly one disease in the history of humanity, and that was a far more serious one, although we've been close with Polio for years.
New Zealand had great success in the short term (being a fairly sparsely populated island more than 3 hours removed from any other significant landmass probably helped with that), but you can't lock everyone indoors every time there is a new case and it's almost certain this will happen unless NZ commits to a long-term multi-year border lockdown.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
Well, you don't know. Therefore you must act as if "can" = "will". Otherwise, you're playing Russian roulette.
> draconic hard lockdown
Travelling ban is not a draconic hard lockdown; in fact it'd allow the country to function mostly as normal. Draconic lockdown would be shutting down all non-essential services (what Norway did in March) and even more drastic measures that other countries used (curfew, home confinement, you're allowed to go out only with a concrete purpose and not "too far away" from your apartment... like it was in France for a while.).
This all makes me sad.
Depression, stress and loneliness all have health consequences too. Whether that is separation from loved ones, or seeing the business that fed your family evaporating before your eyes. In the rush to protect ourselves from a disease with a 99.97% survival rate, that only tips people over the edge who had pre-existing morbid conditions, that most people won't even know that they've had, we have sown the seeds of something that will kill many more people.
IFR seems in the >1% range, admitadly this is skewed towards older people. Maybe that IFR is overestimated slightly, but it's far far more deadly than 0.03%
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/canadians-fed-up-with-unwan...
It's like they don't understand that things are in control and there are well over 325 million people in the US that are not infected/sick/Covid-19 Free.
I'm an expat in Texas and I can't even begin to tell you the kind of phones calls I've received from friends and family about Covid 19 in Texas. I can't blame them, the hysteria created from the media is driving this insanity of fear.
There are about 70,000 detected cases a day... it’s certainly the case that widespread US tourism in Canada by people who haven’t been tested or gone through a 14-day quarantine could result in a significant amount of virus being spread.
Various US states have these restrictions on travel from other states as well, e.g. Hawaii and Maine. Massachusetts is currently requiring out of state travelers from about 40 states to get tested or quarantine for 14 days after arriving.
So this is nothing to do with xenophobia. Simply governments trying to protect their citizens from a virus which kills between 0.25-0.75% of those who are infected.
(Dead people)/(recovered people) = (death rate)
Doing the math based on infection ignores the fact that many cases are in progress, outcome unknown. This makes for much smaller numbers, and a less realistic risk perception based on lack of data for the scope of risk being evaluated.
Flat out, we do not yet know whether active cases will turn bad. This also means death rates can and will change over time too. By tracking outcomes we can understand the impact of science and policy, as well as mother nature and how the virus itself continues to mutate.
Further, there is a secondary risk of ongoing, potentially chronic, complications. People may recover, but are changed significantly. Data on that is harder to boil down.
My own outcome is profound fatigue. It is significant and appears very slow to improve. Being sick was no joke. Being more tired for months on end now isn't either.
And I am fortunate, due to fatigue being among the more mild of the potential bad outcomes we know about today.
Surviving the virus does not always mean returning to normal.
Those governments acting to prevent harm are on stronger ground than many may be aware of.
The health care system costs will be serious and endure for a long time, even by measures of what governments consider a long time. In the US, that will be acute, due to our current policy. Other nations are well justified in many of their policies for this reason alone.
Health care impact translates into increased death rates from other causes. Flatten the curve is about that as much as it is being able to manage the death rate direct from COVID down.
Right now, death is understated and poor health outcomes more seriously missing from the policy discussion, as are the timelines and potential costs, efficacy of our potential remedies.
This mess is here with us for a long time. A poorly managed, non global discussion only makes it all worse across the board, risks, costs, quality of life, etc.
It is time to realize COVID is more likely to transition to endemic than we are to return to life and business as it was last year.
That will be true for humans on this planet period.
Of the millions and millions of people who have now had this virus and recovered without incident, only a small fraction have seen the inside of a medical facility. Only a tiny fraction of those have had “recovery” reported, and even when it is reported, it generally lags by months. The only reason you would divide “deaths” by that number is to mislead people and scare them.
The overall IFR for this virus is somewhere around 0.1-0.6%. That is the actual chance a person will die if they catch it. For healthy people under the age of ~50, divide that by ten (at least).
Do you have a good citation for this, because the Biostatics research university at Cambridge have IFR 10 times that.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Until recently Cambridge had 0.9%, this has increased recently as more evidence has come out. Taking a 0.7% value would mean that 40% of Brooklyn has had it, a figure not backed by serological tests. Even is 100% of Brooklyn had has covid, that would give and IFR of nearly 0.3%
We shall see as more outcomes continue to be known.
We will get better at tracking that because this virus is more likely to be endemic, forced.
Having some healthy respect for this mess, rooted in basic fear and concern for the future, is just not a bad thing.
As we get better at the data related to chronic complications, that info will also give people a more solid reason to live and work differently. Fact is a whole lot more people than we think will suffer a reduction in overall health too.
Also not a bad thing.
Frankly, I believe the outcome based death rates will fall over time as we improve our will and ability to record outcomes. I do not believe it will end up being fractions of a percent.
I also believe complications, organ damage, etc... will be respectable percentages as we improve on capturing that data.
We are finding immunity does not endure. We are also finding repeat cases can vary widely in severity.
Add in the growing reality of it being endemic, and there is a solid basis for real concern.
Ideally, we all remain able to revisit all this after a full year cycle.
Let's put 'em in orbit and assume they survive reentry and land where we can evaluate heads or tails, so we have some flight time in this analogy.
Just for shits and giggles.
It takes a coin anywhere from two weeks to a month to land.
We have tossed all 100 coins, 25 per week over the course of a month.
Our stats could look like this.
Tossed coins = 100 Landed coins = 50 Tail landings = 4
To make it a bit more interesting, we could also say we are tossing 25 new coins per week right now, and that could change up, or down.
New coin tosses this week = 25
Right now, we know the outcome for 50 coins, and 4 of them landed tails.
(4/50) = 8 percent tails rate
We know at least 50 coins are in flight, outcome unknown.
It could be that every other coin toss lands heads. We could also say, there are no more tosses to consider. So let us add the 25 new tosses this week too.
(4/125) = 3.2 percent tails rate. This would be the best case.
It could also be every other coin lands tails too.
(54/100) = 54 percent! That is the worst possible case.
In reality, for this example, we know there are more tosses coming and we also could model poor testing and say we are not aware of all the tosses.
Some error factor could be computed to refine best and worst case too.
The better we are at collecting data, the more those outcomes will tell us.
The more time that passes, the more outcomes will tell us.
We may find tosses at night double risk of landing tails, for example.
Or maybe coins tossed mid week land tails consistently.
Ignoring that which has not come to conclusion biases the risk assessment toward lower risk with a larger error.
Low numbers with high error rates are not all that useful in this context.
Current global stats are:
Coronavirus Cases: 19,725,865
Deaths: 727,548
Recovered: 12,660,022
That's 5.7 percent deaths overall known outcomes with 7,065,865 cases in progress right now.
If people test positive, don't end up in the hospital and we have no death certs filed, they are recovered, but may be harmed in some way. Poor data on that.
Otherwise, we know they died.
Some argue a percentage of those deaths are with COVID causing a death due to other factors.
You can bias that overall 5.7 percent number up or down based on your own personal risk assessment, but dead is still dead, and catching the virus only adds to ones risk. These all count for purposes of policy and understanding danger.
I know at least one person who did that low risk assessment, went to a State with high case load and who has been on a ventilator for a month now.
They may live, and that looks increasingly likely, but will definitely not be the same after it is all said and done.
"I am unlikely to die" carries greater weight in that light, yes?
All I am really saying here is people would be wise to treat this with more respect than we may otherwise feel is warranted.
The basic reasons are simple ignorance (we are doing the science and it takes time) and lack of effective medicine at this time.
Both of those warrant the more firm, lower error numbers we get from actual outcomes.
edit: in case you aren't:
US: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2120-anti-asian-hate-incid...
UK: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/anti-asian-hat...
Australia: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/victoria-urged-to-toughen-hate-c...
Also, if governments had done their job and prevented all travel to/from China (as well as all countries that refused to implement similar restrictions) in the beginning, then we likely wouldn’t be dealing with a pandemic right now, and people wouldn’t have been discriminated against (more than usual that is). I’d say in the beginning (not anymore) it was also justified to be wary of anyone believed to be Chinese since there was a high chance that they recently been to China or had close contact with someone who had been (since Chinese tend to stay together when abroad).
I don’t support anyone getting beaten up no matter what crimes they’ve committed, but I do support isolating China from the rest of the world until we see a positive regime change.
The racism towards Asians in general is overblown. I highly doubt that Malaysians, Koreans, etc. abroad have seen an increase in physical assaults compared to white/black people. If there has been for Chinese people then it’s also important to consider that they in democratic countries went out to have anti-democracy protests (and the Chinese were often very aggressive during these anti-democracy protests).
https://www.ft.com/content/52e7062b-0cb2-448a-b944-05b3025d4...
But my loved one is in another country and the last thing my heart needs is more lock-downs. We need to consider what closed borders are doing to bi-national married / unmarried couples. They've been a largely ignored demographic during this pandemic and collateral damage due to the broad and sweeping policies that have taken place on the borders.