This reminds me of the speculative rationalizations that are given after-the-fact whenever the stock market rises or falls.

So let me chime in with the speculation:

The biggest factor is probably the realization that COVID is not as big a personal risk as feared, no matter what the media or the government says. People are gladly using COVID as an excuse to work from home or avoid meeting their elderly relatives, but when it comes to avoiding infection in order to save "the system", enough people simply don't care anymore. It's too abstract.

Currently, about one in 4000 Scots is hospitalized, which says that approximately only one in 40 Scots directly knows someone hospitalized with COVID, assuming they know 100 people each.

However, the chance of directly knowing someone that had a positive COVID test is 1 in 40, which says most Scots will know someone who had a mild case of COVID.

If you are under 25, the risk to you from Covid is basically tiny. I can understand young people not accepting having their life destroyed from living under a lockdown over a virus that is unlikely to do them harm.

In Scotland

            Infections       Hospitalization     Deaths
    0-4      1,137             62                  0
    5-14     2,973             30                  0
    15-19    6,771             41                  0
    20-24    7,896             65                  1

We have this in NY and CA among other places. That the Midwest and South are going from "pretend everything is fine" to "full scale lockdown again" was a decision those states made. But NY and CA are still far from requiring a second full scale lockdown and are instead focusing on specific areas and counties.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-19-death-rates-are-...

Apparently that claim was based on this study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.20076042v...

There are a few comments on that page about how that claim was misleading and/or inaccurate and mis-reported by the media.

And COVID-19 is strictly following Gompertz-Mathematics - just like a seasonal corona-virus. For any usual outbreak (f'/f) is falling exponentially all the time... There are no visible trend-changes around most policy-changes.

And there's no statistical epidemiological evidence that masks did anything good. In some countries with masks things got a lot worse. (more efficient catch+inhale? Or catch+transmit without being infected?)

Most of the hype around COVID-19 is just cheating by using "reporting date" instead of "date of death" to make Gompertz-Functions look like seriously dangerous exponentials...

If you have some datasets that allow to compare "reporting date" with "date of death" it is astonishing to see how many reporting-anomalies appear around policy-changes...

There are plenty of datasets that include date of death instead of reporting date and they show the count of deaths increasing again as well, on a lag, just like you would expect.

The low fatality rate we have enjoyed recently has been partially a result of the availability of improved medical care. Unfortunately that is a stepwise function where once you have surpassed the amount of available care, the improvements we have made in care revert to some extent. We don't know how much.

I see that you only really post about COVID stuff on hackernews, and I don't know why anyone would bother, but what truly blows my mind is the amount of hubris it takes to sit at home, read a few news stories, and say "I know better than the majority of people who have spent their lives studying disease because I know some statistics and read a few articles that disagreed with the mainstream."

Lets do some real mathematics.

1) Get good data (e.g. death by date).

2) Take a look at the Logarithm of the growthrate ln(f'/f)

3) Spot all those straight lines - those are the curves of outbreaks

4) Turn those lines into a working formula for an outbreak

5) Calculate predictions - evaluate trend-changes - look when new outbreaks happened.

It's just that simple. Results won't give you insight about the mainstream, but it will give some insights about reality.

Some countries are easier (Mexico, Germany, ...).. Some have more outbreaks and complications. But the basic principles of the mathematics of COVID-19 outbreaks around the globe are the same.

Calculating the new outbreaks of Sweden is more advanced because the start of the new curve is hidden behind another outbreak. But now there's at least enough visible to give good estimates.

Start is hidden under other smaller outbreaks, so it's not so easy to measure it exactly. But soon it should peak (if it hasn't already...).

If they don't do any nonsense that changes the mathematics of COVID-19 completely Sweden will be fine. The curve has normal size of a seasonal flu. Other countries in Europe are doing a lot worse.

I agree with you. We're in for a rough winter, at least in the US -- but it seems that there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Most people I know who are engaging in "risky" behavior when it comes to covid spread are either (1) just tired of being coped up and so being reckless (2) old enough that they don't want to spend 2 of their final years of life not seeing their family, and think the risk of catching it is worth it (3) young and relatively risk free (e.g. x3 flu mortality rate range) so don't worry about it for them or those they're seeing (others in the same boat).

The new public messaging needs to be: "It Ain't Over Yet" kind of thing.

Hopefully this doesn't turn into a very messy public fight given that I fully expect a lot of schools and workplaces to require vaccination to physically enter a school or an office.

The first month or so in the Bay Area people were super diligent. There was nobody on the streets, hardly anybody shopping. Within a month you noticed more people on the streets, by 6 months, traffic was 75% of what it was before Covid.

You can't expect people to put their lives on hold indefinitely, especially people at low risk. I know that in Canada 20-30 year olds accounted for the vast majority of new cases. They were just willing to take a chance.

And even though these two vaccines look promising, you won't get a significant number of people vaccinated until the second half of 2021. That's another 7-8 months away.

Reminds me of that movie scene in Apocalypse Now when they are getting mortared on the beach while trying to surf - "The tide doesn't come in for six hours, do you want to wait here for six hours?" - Lt. Col. Kilgore

And now with the promise of a vaccine, the word "indefinitely" no longer applies.

Of course roll out matters. Rochester MN (Home of the Mayo clinic) might open before the rest of the country just because the ratio of health care vs everyone else is enough that they may as well vaccinate the whole town and let it open up.

"kill your elderly". Dont you feel bad for doing what you do? Seriously, please, reconsider the way you connect with fellow humans.