Having spent the last year under (3), I dream of 1 or 2.
That said, it very much dependent on the country. I live somewhere that is 20 x 20 miles in size (Hong Kong). The strictness of the border control (3 weeks in a hotel room if you leave and come back) make leaving pretty much impossible.
That, combined with extremely conservative local restrictions (not to mention the political situation) takes a significant toll after a while.
This is mostly an artefact of the fact that HK is so small. At least you’re not in Macau, which is 30 sq km?
Macau has quarantine free travel with the Mainland, so that's >9 million sq km ;)
I'm quite surprised that China was able to pull it off, because they're a major trade economy and must have millions of people coming and going. Of course it helps to have a government that can take any action without regard for rights or political consequences.
This is impossible I think for a country like the US with vital land borders and constant trade across them. I think it's also very hard for democratic counties where people have rights.
Australia and China managed to do this.
All the countries where this worked seem to have the advantage of being geographically and geopolitically distant from Italy, which meant they could take action against their outbreaks at a relatively early stage before they got deeply embedded in society. (Early on, cases were more or less a gradient radiating out from Italy, probably because they had a major outbreak which went completely undetected as in literally reporting zero cases country-wide despite having an awful lot more than that.)
In the past, EU countries did not want to delegate health care to the EU (except for approving medicine). So this would require lots of individual countries (including Sweden and, until this year, the UK) to suddenly agree on a single strict lockdown. Very unlikely to happen.
The real tragedy is that most of countries are following UK and US as their model because most of their government policy makers are trained in US and US, and they don't have the capacity and courage to set out their own plans.
This seems to have been the strategy in the past with similar risks. And it avoids the costs of freedom and live at the same time. What am I missing?
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency...
As far as I can tell, their most stringent restrictions are limits on group gatherings to 8, and closing bars at 8pm:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-30/swedish-h...
Contrast to France, Italy, the UK, Belgium, etc., where people have been forcibly restricted to their homes for a significant portion of the last year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14034948209802...
Reasonable people can disagree about policy choices, but misrepresenting facts as a starting point does not make you look reasonable.
> Sweden had to go back on it
They did not. If your standard for "going back on it" is "adding some restrictions", then you are erecting a straw man argument. By this standard, every country in Europe "had to go back on it", as all of them changed their tactics over time.
Also, not incidentally: I'm aware of no legitimate source for the claim that Sweden's hospitals were "full" (which is a non-specific claim). Most sources I've read emphasized that hospitals were under stress -- like in most parts of the Europe -- with some hospitals closer than others to capacity, and resources being shifted around the nation to manage:
https://www.thelocal.se/20201211/is-the-second-wave-overload...
Again, you could take this article and put it in Paris, Berlin, London, Brussels or other major cities in Europe in December of 2020. Details matter, and vague claims that "hospitals are full" are meaningless.
And i never said the Swedish hospital system was "full", just that their death toll compared to their neighbours was appalling, and said neighbors had to add restrictions on movement from Sweden.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/24/swedens-2020-death-...
Everyone compares countries all the time.
You literally just did it a few posts up by comparing it to other Scandinavian countries which are all different from Sweden.
Covid zealots compare other countries to New Zealand when it's convenient.
All with different cultures climate population density etc.
If what you're saying is true then you can't make any claims about any country's success rate because they're all unique.
You're just selecting Sweden as incomparable because it doesn't fit your narrative.
New Zealand are isolated by water from everyone, lockdown is drastically easier in that case.
You're cherry picking and choosing cultural aspects and labeling it as 'unquestionable fact' with no scientific evidence.
Classic Covid zealot move.
As a matter of fact, we're all human beings that like to congregate together and eat out and go to bars and coffee shops and see live music, and our biological drives have way more significance than anything cultural .
It's extremely disingenuous.
I don't know what "Covid zealot" is supposed to mean, but i think you need a reality check.
Overall, Sweden has taken a light touch with the pandemic, and continues to do so, even though, yes, they've adapted over time.
Most other lockdown measures are questionable at best, including mandatory mask usage. They are clearly symbolic tools for the political class to signal that something is being done, but the data to support them is not very strong considering that there is not much of a control group.
Enough for what? Hospital capacity was wildly sufficient for regular times, but the pandemic turned that around. Even Germany, which has multiple times the capacity per capita than France, is struggling in that regard. What is "enough"?
> but also to avoid superspreader events
Lol. Events with more than 2000 people outside ( at the best of times, usually it has been flat out forbidden), and 6-100 inside have been forbidden in France since last year. That obviously didn't help.
> Most other lockdown measures are questionable at best, including mandatory mask usage. They are clearly symbolic tools for the political class to signal that something is being done, but the data to support them is not very strong considering that there is not much of a control group.
There is, check the US and Brazil.
Indeed, "enough" for normal times is not the same as "enough" for pandemic times.
> Even Germany, which has multiple times the capacity per capita than France, is struggling in that regard. What is "enough"?
Of course it's a "struggle" to suddenly work at capacity, but Germany wasn't in the situation of having to turn down patients. To the contrary, Germany was able to pick up patients from neighboring countries. That's "enough".
> Events with more than 2000 people outside ( at the best of times, usually it has been flat out forbidden), and 6-100 inside have been forbidden in France since last year. That obviously didn't help.
How do you know that it didn't help? We know from epidemiological studies that superspreader events were responsible for causing a surge of cases in a short amount of time.
> There is, check the US and Brazil.
There really isn't, we have countries with strong lockdowns doing poorly and countries with weak lockdowns doing relatively well, and everything in between. Lockdown measures are also difficult to compare, as are populations, as is testing and reporting.
For example, Brazil with minimal lockdowns is doing just as poorly as Peru, with heavy lockdowns. Florida is doing better than many other US states with heavier restrictions. Japan is supposedly doing well with few restrictions, but also performs little testing.
There are lots of variables and unknowns here and one can always cherrypick data to argue for or against lockdowns in various forms.
https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-germany-icu-capacit...
> How do you know that it didn't help? We know from epidemiological studies that superspreader events were responsible for causing a surge of cases in a short amount of time.
It didn't help in the sense that hospitals are overcapacity and new cases, hospitalisation and death rates were still exploding until the recent pseudo-lockdown.
In most countries, running at 90% ICU capacity is the normal state of affairs, Germany being an exception.
Of course you can always warn that the health care system is just about to collapse.
In 2015:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/19/nhs-collapse...
In 2016:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/10/hospitals-on...
In 2017:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/20/nhs-at-break...
In 2018:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/06/nhs-fa...
In 2019:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/02/nhs-winter-c...
In 2020:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/21/doctors-warn-c...
In 2021:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/09/nhs-counts-the...
Spoiler: The NHS did not collapse. Working right at the brink of collapse is normal.
> It didn't help in the sense that hospitals are overcapacity and new cases, hospitalisation and death rates were still exploding until the recent pseudo-lockdown.
According to your own source, hospitals are not over capacity. If you had a few super spreader events, that could obviously change rather quickly. Whether a "pseudo-lockdown" meaningfully slows spread is not so obvious.
There are thousands of English HCPs talking about this. Here's one: https://twitter.com/seahorse4000/status/1386263023900319745?...
(That comment about staff is for their particular NHS trust, not the NHS as a whole)
We rationed oxygen
We shut the hospital
I was managing icu pts on amu
We stopped elective surgery
We had over 400 staff off with covid
I had 9 pts die on a single shift
You are using an anecdotal Tweet as an actual epidemiological citation.
It's very interesting to me how low the bar is for the Covid zealots scientific sources!
Having said that about utilisation, what pandemic beds requirements meant in the rest of the world and would have meant here is that no elective surgeries could be performed; leukaemia/cancer patient stem cell/marrow transplants couldn’t go ahead and trauma victims risked not being able to be cared for. This was absolutely the case in the UK during the height of things (friends are ortho/trauma surgeons over there and ended up working as assistants in nursing for 3-4 weeks in January).
So, with increase in ICU bed availability through adding new beds and with stopping any potential procedures that would electively require an ICU bed for recovery countries were able to basically meet demands (although many of my emergency colleagues in the UK reported having to determine who was going to be for ICU or not - ie top level care was not offered to some people during the height due to lack of resources) - there is now a massive backlog of patients requiring their baseline care to be fulfilled.
For example, another of my colleague’s mothers is a (retired) dermatologist in London. She was pulled back into work because there are now people presenting eith melanomas that were missed because no one was going for their regular care early in the year. And now they’ve spread and now people are dying because of this; not to mention the backup.
There’s no silver lining here.
The argument was: Did the hospitals overflow from Covid?
And they did not overflow anywhere in the world.
> New Toronto field hospital prepares to accept patients as ICUs overflow
> Greater Toronto Area hospitals are so overwhelmed due to record COVID-19 admissions that some patients are being transferred to health-care centres outside the region.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/coronavirus-newsletter-april-...
Post an actual link to ICU numbers if you truly '#believeTheScience'
Here I did it for you.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=078a3...
Do your own data analysis and see ICU admissions are only up 15% or so.
Also, according to other media outlets, ICUs in Toronto haven't filled up, they're 'NEAR capacity'.....which has been the story for over a year everywhere.
The media drums things up to make money and should not be used as evidence for your argument.
The media also said San Diego ICUs and Houston ICUs were overflowing but it didn't happen.
For example, this sensation article never happened:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/...
Do you have anything supporting your argument of hospital overflow with substance?
Or do you get all of your 'science' from the news media?
First you attacked a comment (above), claiming they'd moved goalposts in their arguments, and then you claimed hospitals had not overflowed. Subsequently, you responded to a comment providing a citation saying they did, by demanding a different source - which is moving the goalposts, the very thing you criticized in someone else.
Here, look at this, another article showing Indian hospitals have overflowed, this time from Reuters:
> Indian hospitals turn away patients in COVID-19 ‘tsunami’ [1]
This is relevant because you yourself consider Reuters a citable source, at least when you like what it is saying [2].
That comment you cited Reuters in reminded me of another of your comments [3] (I actually did mark your words, as requested):
> Mark my words America is heading towards herd immunity as long as we stay this course, and this will be all over by the end of the year. (you, eight months ago)
How's that herd immunity coming along? Was it all over by the end of the year?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-daily-coronavirus...
Texas had 40,000 people at a football game, has no covid restrictions, and is at record lows for Covid.
With the exception of Michigan almost every single state has reached record lows of Covid.
It's not an exact science but we have reached herd immunity in almost all of America within a few months of what I predicted.
All with only 25 to 40 percent vaccination number. So it's clearly not vaccination or restrictions providing the full herd immunity.
As for India sure I'll give you that. I should amend my statement to mean 'First world' countries with adequate ICU capacity had no ICU overflow.
You have to quote a third world country with the average personal income of 2000 dollars a month to support your argument because the hundreds and hundreds of other worldwide first and second world countries didn't have any hospital overflows. This is not surprising or unexpected and disingenuous of you to discredit hundreds of other countries in favor of a single country to support your argument.
However, the rest of the first world outside of India has had no hospital overflow.
Asking for a legitimate source this is not the news media.... is not 'moving the goal posts'.
You 'beleiveInScience' Covid zealots think the news media is science. I hate to break it to you but the news media is not a reliable scientific source. You should try to learn what science is before you #believe in it.
I'm not sure what you Covid zealots require to feel safe again.
I legitimately feel sorry for you.
You're in a permanent prison of fear.
Official sources and raw data: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210310-paris-hospitals-... https://bonjour.tousanticovid.gouv.fr/app.html#chiffres
Are you going to shift the goalposts again and redefine to "Anglosphere first world countries"? Or are you going to admit you don't know what the hell you're talking about?
"Covid zealots" is a peculiar term, i'll give that. Makes little sense of course, but nothing you say does.
ICU's run "near capacity" all the time, so the news source you linked is simply stating a normal situation in a sensational context.
See here: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc....
What I mean by Covid zealot is people who believe things that aren't real about Covid based on poor critical thinking and/or poor understanding of the data or some other reason that I don't understand.
ICUs in France had their capacity doubled over last summer, and since the beginning of the year everything elective has been postponed to make place for Covid patients.
> What I mean by Covid zealot is people who believe things that aren't real about Covid based on poor critical thinking and/or poor understanding of the data or some other reason that I don't understand
So denialists that still fail to grasp the gravity of the situation, like yourself?
Patient numbers are still NOT ICU capacity. Numbers can go up and still not be at capacity.
If I'm indeed not missing something that is either poor reasoning or a disengenuous citation.
If you get all of your information from the news media there's 'gravity to the situation' but if you look at statistics...
Covid is mostly over in the states and either over or on the downswing around the world, with the exception of a few third world countries.
You should look at statistics and not the news media.
In the U.S., States are at record lows of new infections and almost every state has lifted most of it's restrictions and we're not even at 40% vaccination rate.
Even New Zealand has opened it's borders to Austrailia and their vaccination rate is in the mid teens.
Covid's fatality rate in the states was around 0.00125 and I'm assuming other places as well.
Trying to understand the gravity of the situation that you claim exists.
It's like The 3 billion people who believe in God. Despite all evidence to the contrary the zealots will cling to their narrative.
Totally wrong. Johns Hopkins says the case fatality rate in the states is 1.8% [1]. Many others are worse, like Canada at 2.0% and 2.9% for the United Kingdom.
You can do the math.
Hell only 33 million in the states tested positive for contracting Corona.
33 million / 400 million
Which is infection rate of .0825
Even if you double it to account for non tested cases that .16% JUST CASES.
Even if you double that you're not even at 1% yet.
The experts err to the EXTREME side of safety.
These are the same experts that say only eat steak if it's well done and not to drink more than 2/3 cup of wine in an evening.
You can look up the definition.
so 572,674 / 32,124,869 = 1.8%
As I already said, and as you can look up yourself, in the link I gave.
The fatality chance for a healthy person in the general population is the measure of risk for the average person. Using the same measure of population that the R value uses to calculate infectiousness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
Have you been using 1.8% chance of death as your chance of dying? I would be scared too.
For a healthy person to become infected is a very small number to begin with and highly biased towards the elderly or people with co morbidities.
You can legitimately lighten up. Your risk from this is infinitesimally small if you're under 55 and healthy.
If not it's still unbelievably small.
> fatality ratios (the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases)
So you’re wrong. Again.
It's literally the definitions of those words.
It's fine continue to be scared. I legit feel bad for you.
My state just lifted the mask mandate recently and were not even at 30% vaccination rate yet.
Feels good.
In related news:
https://twitter.com/nucholibre/status/1384558587339362306/ph...
You're implicitly conceding that contrary to your earlier assertions, there have been hospital overflows, but now are further restricting your claims to only apply to first and second world countries.
You're also ignoring the fact that I chose this particular article not because I couldn't find first world examples (I already did, see above), but because this one was from a source (Reuters) you've already endorsed by citing articles from it yourself.
Now you're writing a rambling attack to distract from the fact that you have nothing to support your claims, and can only try to evade the evidence against them.
Any person with good faith and an honest mindset would agree that India is the exception not the rule.
Covid zealots are not known for honesty though.
As a healthy person, I personally would have been better off under (1). However, I think the economic and emotional damage of that number of deaths would have been too much for society as a whole.
The whole 1 vs 2 thing is just a matter of how much must the whole suffer for the benefit of the few?
So far. Add 6, 12 or 24 months.
I would choose a mix of (1) and (2), but no matter what we say here it won't change the past.
Going forward we can either choose the goal of no masks, no vaccine pass and no restrictions this year. Follow Texas for more on how that works.
Or we can go on with restrictions and random shutdowns when infections rise above an arbitrary level.
I know i would choose the first option.
[1] should have been the best strategy.
Until recently nobody in the US had the idea of removing restrictions and allowing 40.000 to gather for sport events.
That was until Texas did it and they are doing just as well as those with restrictions.
https://fee.org/articles/texas-has-fewer-covid-cases-than-mi...
1. Do very little intervention, but perhaps isolate the vulnerable. This was the "Sweden strategy".
2. Do big interventions if cases rise, but only so far as is required to prevent hospitals being over-whelmed. This was the strategy in most of Europe, and in particular the UK.
3. Do big interventions with the intention of reaching "covid zero", including restrictions on international travel. This was the strategy of Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and perhaps China (hard to get the full story).
Having spent the past year under (2) I wish I was living under (3). Sure it's painful in the short term, but compared to rolling lock-downs for over 12 months?