7 ms·

And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc Does anyone know of any large country that managed to: - not lockdown - keep the disease und

by kmlx 6y ago

And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc Does anyone know of any large country that managed to: - not lockdown - keep the disease under control ?

ekianjo 6y ago
Japan maybe but it's unclear why at this stage.
- bleuedejapan 6y ago
  One important aspect is that in Japan, there were no huge clusters in old folks homes. There are many others, but this is one of the most important.
- newsbinator 6y ago
  Naively, could a factor be that in Japan wearing masks all the time was already normal practice, long before this pandemic?
  - asiachick 6y ago
    No, people did not wear masks "all the time" nor did even "most" people wear masks. Go to any image search. Find images before February. (Search Hardly a mask in sight. They are common enough no one finds them strange but they weren't remotely the norm either. https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12... https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before...
    - newsbinator 6y ago
      By "all the time", I mean take any given adult in Tokyo and there's a good chance they have experience wearing a mask for a couple days every year. In Japan it's not only the immunocompromised or healthcare workers who have ever donned a mask: it's nearly everybody. You'd be hard-pressed to ride the metro and not see a handful of mask-wearers on any given Tuesday in recent years. Whereas in countries like the United States you'd rarely see masks outside of a serious medical setting, and you wouldn't be able to buy masks for a dollar at literally every corner shop within 100 meters of your home.
cygx 6y ago
Yeah, your list kind of lacks nuance. Eg compare https://covid.observer/de/#daily to https://covid.observer/gb/#daily and https://covid.observer/de/#per-capita to https://covid.observer/gb/#per-capita The German numbers peaked 2020-04-06, the British numbers have yet to peak. The former are at 0.099 fatal cases per 1000 citizen, the latter at 0.54
- mhandley 6y ago
  Looking at cumulative graphs like that is misleading. It's also impossible to conclude anything about peaking in the UK from the total figures, as the baseline for testing has been changing as the number of tests has increased rapidly in the last few weeks. Fortunately there is one dataset that has remained constant throughout. In the government's daily releases https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-for-the-public https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information... there are "pillar 1" statistics. This number is the hospital admissions that test positive, and it's the only data set that has been gathered in a consistent way throughout. The pillar 1 stats peaked at 5903 new cases on April 5th. Yesterdays pillar 1 new cases were 1277, so the UK cases indeed have peaked and have declined significantly since the peak. They're being a bit stubborn at decreasing below 1000 per day though.
TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
Anders Tegnell, some say the head of Swedish plan against COVID was recently on BBC HARDtalk. You can hear his views on the plan they implemented.
- cygx 6y ago
  Like the British numbers, the Swedish ones have yet to peak, and they are at 0.4/1000 fatalities (ie four times the German numbers I cited in my sibling comment). If your primary goal was prevention of loss of life, the Swedish approach doesn't look so hot either.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    I am struggling to reconcile "the british numbers have yet to peak" with stories like that: https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-disappearing-so-fast-oxford-vaccine-has-only-50-chance-of-working-11993739 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-disappearing-so-fast-... As for deaths, they have peaked in early April in England (see first spreadhseet "COVID 19 total announced deaths"): https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
    - cygx 6y ago
      I provided links plotting daily numbers for various countries in my other comment. Just compare https://covid.observer/gb/#daily https://covid.observer/se/#daily to eg https://covid.observer/it/#daily https://covid.observer/de/#daily There's also the possibility that numbers will essentially stabilize, eg https://covid.observer/fr/#daily https://covid.observer/es/#daily We don't know yet which way the UK will go, as the number of active cases is still growing.
      - cm2187 6y ago
        And it doesn't strike you that zero people recovered in the UK based on your chart...?
eitland 6y ago
AFAIK Germany has done much better than the other ones on your list.
rumanator 6y ago
> And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc This assertion grossly misrepresents the facts. Italy and Spain were one of the first countries after China to be massively affected by covid19. They endured a fast and entirely unexpected rise in infection rates during a period where WHO was still repeating the Chinese regime's claims that covid19 didn't spread among humans. Still, once they started to track the disease and register hundreds of of deaths in patients infected with the disease, they acted decisively. Not only regarding quarantine and social distancing but also putting up massive field hospitals like Madrid's IFEMA hospital. Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat. The UK, US, Brazil and Russia's government started by either pretending it did not existed, assumed they could ride the wave while doing nothing at all, or that everything would just kill off a bunch of people and vanish without any need to worry. Arguably, the government of Brazil is still in the denial stage. That approach to an epidemic is world's apart than the approach taken by either Spain or Italy or France or Portugal or Greece or Germany or any other country in the world whose government decided to act responsibly and looking after their citizens best interests.
- geogra4 6y ago
  >They endured a fast and entirely unexpected rise in infection rates during a period where WHO was still repeating the Chinese regime's claims that covid19 didn't spread among humans. Do you have any evidence from that? China locked down 11 million people in Wuhan on January 23[0] which was a whole week before the first cases showed up in Italy[1]. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1ZM1G9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1... [1]: https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_gennaio_30/coronavirus-italia-corona-9d6dc436-4343-11ea-bdc8-faf1f56f19b7.shtml https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_gennaio_30/coronavirus-i...
  - morelisp 6y ago
    There is some current US right-wing propaganda that China was lying to (in some versions, paying off or running) the WHO to intentionally spread the virus. It's effective because most people don't know the difference between "no confirmed spread between humans" (which the WHO said early in the pandemic) and "confirmed no spread between humans" (which they did not, but is what the propaganda claims was said).
thanhhaimai 6y ago
Large country: Vietnam - More than 2x population of California - Next to China geographically - Zero death from COVID so far [1] - Has a very active campaign on raising awareness for COVID, including the famous COVID song. [1] https://news.google.com/covid19/map?mid=%2Fm%2F01crd5 https://news.google.com/covid19/map?mid=%2Fm%2F01crd5
- matwood 6y ago
  Vietnam has used targeted lockdowns. Overall Vietnams strategy was very aggressive on all fronts. https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/21/vietnam-has-reported-no-coronavirus-deaths-how/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/21/vietnam-has-reported-...
  - GregarianChild 6y ago
    Given that almost nobody suggested doing nothing, I imagine that a targetted lockdown is really the opposite of a country-wide lockdown. Without elaboration "lockdown" is usually understood as referring to a country-wide lockdown.
GregarianChild 6y ago
Taiwan. The country has 23M inhabitants, most of them are clustered in a few densely populated metro areas (Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung–Changhua, Taoyuan–Zhongli, Tainan and Hsinchu). Taiwan had many daily flights to/from China, including daily directs from Wuhan (stopped 31 December 2019). Taiwan is one of the world's older countries (median age ~43). Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [2] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. None were confirmed to have COVID-19 after 14 days had passed. (The only advantage Taiwan had was that facemasks were widely used and even expected on public transport for years.) For all those reasons, Taiwan was at unusually high risk from Covid. Yet, no lockdown. No country managed the disease better than Taiwan. We should learn from Taiwan. See [1] for an analysis of Taiwan's response from early March 2020. It is interesting to reflect upon why most countries ignored Taiwan. The World Health Organization's locking out Taiwan on China's request is probably one reason. Is it the only one? [1] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32125371/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32125371/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship)
- thewileyone 6y ago
  The Taiwanese have been practicing wearing face masks since the early 90's. My first time there in 1991, up to 30% wore face masks when in crowded spaces. My last time in 2018, up to 80% wore face masks when in crowded spaces.
  - asiachick 6y ago
    ??? Last 3 times I went to Taiwan I didn't see 80% wearing face masks in crowed places. I have pictures from this last December 2019 as well January 2018. Walking around shopping centers, being on the subway, going to night markets, no one is wearing any masks. At least no in Taipei or Dansui
nkkollaw 6y ago
Japan, Sweden, Taiwan.

by kmlx 6y ago

And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc Does anyone know of any large country that managed to: - not lockdown - keep the disease under control ?

ekianjo 6y ago

Japan maybe but it's unclear why at this stage.

bleuedejapan 6y ago
One important aspect is that in Japan, there were no huge clusters in old folks homes. There are many others, but this is one of the most important.
newsbinator 6y ago
Naively, could a factor be that in Japan wearing masks all the time was already normal practice, long before this pandemic?
- asiachick 6y ago
  No, people did not wear masks "all the time" nor did even "most" people wear masks. Go to any image search. Find images before February. (Search Hardly a mask in sight. They are common enough no one finds them strange but they weren't remotely the norm either. https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+crowded+before:2019-12... https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before:2019-12-31&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+station+crowded+before...
  - newsbinator 6y ago
    By "all the time", I mean take any given adult in Tokyo and there's a good chance they have experience wearing a mask for a couple days every year. In Japan it's not only the immunocompromised or healthcare workers who have ever donned a mask: it's nearly everybody. You'd be hard-pressed to ride the metro and not see a handful of mask-wearers on any given Tuesday in recent years. Whereas in countries like the United States you'd rarely see masks outside of a serious medical setting, and you wouldn't be able to buy masks for a dollar at literally every corner shop within 100 meters of your home.

cygx 6y ago

Yeah, your list kind of lacks nuance. Eg compare https://covid.observer/de/#daily to https://covid.observer/gb/#daily and https://covid.observer/de/#per-capita to https://covid.observer/gb/#per-capita The German numbers peaked 2020-04-06, the British numbers have yet to peak. The former are at 0.099 fatal cases per 1000 citizen, the latter at 0.54

mhandley 6y ago
Looking at cumulative graphs like that is misleading. It's also impossible to conclude anything about peaking in the UK from the total figures, as the baseline for testing has been changing as the number of tests has increased rapidly in the last few weeks. Fortunately there is one dataset that has remained constant throughout. In the government's daily releases https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-for-the-public https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information... there are "pillar 1" statistics. This number is the hospital admissions that test positive, and it's the only data set that has been gathered in a consistent way throughout. The pillar 1 stats peaked at 5903 new cases on April 5th. Yesterdays pillar 1 new cases were 1277, so the UK cases indeed have peaked and have declined significantly since the peak. They're being a bit stubborn at decreasing below 1000 per day though.

TheGallopedHigh 6y ago

Anders Tegnell, some say the head of Swedish plan against COVID was recently on BBC HARDtalk. You can hear his views on the plan they implemented.

cygx 6y ago
Like the British numbers, the Swedish ones have yet to peak, and they are at 0.4/1000 fatalities (ie four times the German numbers I cited in my sibling comment). If your primary goal was prevention of loss of life, the Swedish approach doesn't look so hot either.
- cm2187 6y ago
  I am struggling to reconcile "the british numbers have yet to peak" with stories like that: https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-disappearing-so-fast-oxford-vaccine-has-only-50-chance-of-working-11993739 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-disappearing-so-fast-... As for deaths, they have peaked in early April in England (see first spreadhseet "COVID 19 total announced deaths"): https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
  - cygx 6y ago
    I provided links plotting daily numbers for various countries in my other comment. Just compare https://covid.observer/gb/#daily https://covid.observer/se/#daily to eg https://covid.observer/it/#daily https://covid.observer/de/#daily There's also the possibility that numbers will essentially stabilize, eg https://covid.observer/fr/#daily https://covid.observer/es/#daily We don't know yet which way the UK will go, as the number of active cases is still growing.
    - cm2187 6y ago
      And it doesn't strike you that zero people recovered in the UK based on your chart...?

eitland 6y ago

AFAIK Germany has done much better than the other ones on your list.

rumanator 6y ago

> And Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Iran, etc etc This assertion grossly misrepresents the facts. Italy and Spain were one of the first countries after China to be massively affected by covid19. They endured a fast and entirely unexpected rise in infection rates during a period where WHO was still repeating the Chinese regime's claims that covid19 didn't spread among humans. Still, once they started to track the disease and register hundreds of of deaths in patients infected with the disease, they acted decisively. Not only regarding quarantine and social distancing but also putting up massive field hospitals like Madrid's IFEMA hospital. Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat. The UK, US, Brazil and Russia's government started by either pretending it did not existed, assumed they could ride the wave while doing nothing at all, or that everything would just kill off a bunch of people and vanish without any need to worry. Arguably, the government of Brazil is still in the denial stage. That approach to an epidemic is world's apart than the approach taken by either Spain or Italy or France or Portugal or Greece or Germany or any other country in the world whose government decided to act responsibly and looking after their citizens best interests.

geogra4 6y ago
>They endured a fast and entirely unexpected rise in infection rates during a period where WHO was still repeating the Chinese regime's claims that covid19 didn't spread among humans. Do you have any evidence from that? China locked down 11 million people in Wuhan on January 23[0] which was a whole week before the first cases showed up in Italy[1]. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1ZM1G9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1... [1]: https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_gennaio_30/coronavirus-italia-corona-9d6dc436-4343-11ea-bdc8-faf1f56f19b7.shtml https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_gennaio_30/coronavirus-i...
- morelisp 6y ago
  There is some current US right-wing propaganda that China was lying to (in some versions, paying off or running) the WHO to intentionally spread the virus. It's effective because most people don't know the difference between "no confirmed spread between humans" (which the WHO said early in the pandemic) and "confirmed no spread between humans" (which they did not, but is what the propaganda claims was said).

thanhhaimai 6y ago

Large country: Vietnam - More than 2x population of California - Next to China geographically - Zero death from COVID so far [1] - Has a very active campaign on raising awareness for COVID, including the famous COVID song. [1] https://news.google.com/covid19/map?mid=%2Fm%2F01crd5 https://news.google.com/covid19/map?mid=%2Fm%2F01crd5

matwood 6y ago
Vietnam has used targeted lockdowns. Overall Vietnams strategy was very aggressive on all fronts. https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/21/vietnam-has-reported-no-coronavirus-deaths-how/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/21/vietnam-has-reported-...
- GregarianChild 6y ago
  Given that almost nobody suggested doing nothing, I imagine that a targetted lockdown is really the opposite of a country-wide lockdown. Without elaboration "lockdown" is usually understood as referring to a country-wide lockdown.

GregarianChild 6y ago

Taiwan. The country has 23M inhabitants, most of them are clustered in a few densely populated metro areas (Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung–Changhua, Taoyuan–Zhongli, Tainan and Hsinchu). Taiwan had many daily flights to/from China, including daily directs from Wuhan (stopped 31 December 2019). Taiwan is one of the world's older countries (median age ~43). Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess [2] and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung (near Taipei), on 31 January, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. In reaction, Taiwan's government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked around 600k citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. None were confirmed to have COVID-19 after 14 days had passed. (The only advantage Taiwan had was that facemasks were widely used and even expected on public transport for years.) For all those reasons, Taiwan was at unusually high risk from Covid. Yet, no lockdown. No country managed the disease better than Taiwan. We should learn from Taiwan. See [1] for an analysis of Taiwan's response from early March 2020. It is interesting to reflect upon why most countries ignored Taiwan. The World Health Organization's locking out Taiwan on China's request is probably one reason. Is it the only one? [1] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32125371/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32125371/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Princess_(ship)

thewileyone 6y ago
The Taiwanese have been practicing wearing face masks since the early 90's. My first time there in 1991, up to 30% wore face masks when in crowded spaces. My last time in 2018, up to 80% wore face masks when in crowded spaces.
- asiachick 6y ago
  ??? Last 3 times I went to Taiwan I didn't see 80% wearing face masks in crowed places. I have pictures from this last December 2019 as well January 2018. Walking around shopping centers, being on the subway, going to night markets, no one is wearing any masks. At least no in Taipei or Dansui

nkkollaw 6y ago

Japan, Sweden, Taiwan.