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> I sometimes wonder how many fewer USians would have died in this pandemic had it occurred outside of an election year. The time to judge the different strate

> I sometimes wonder how many fewer USians would have died in this pandemic had it occurred outside of an election year. The time to judge the different strategies has not come yet. At the least, we need to wait until the pandemic is over and the counts are in. I don't trust any count until somebody takes a good look at the excess mortality. Right now it's just way too easy to manipulate the numbers in any direction until your hospitals overflow (and even then, the press might not report it). The real case numbers may be off by a factor of below 2 or over 10 and immunity in the population may already exist due to other corona viruses or maybe not, we don't know yet. Other counties which seem to be doing very well until now may still fail horribly. The economic impact may play out in vastly different ways. Currently it seems that hard containment is the best strategy but it requires coordination in a large area and high compliance in the population. In a few months, the vaccine could be available any day and it might work perfectly or very poorly.

lostlogin 6y ago
> counties which seem to be doing very well until now may still fail horribly Sweden was an example of this, but Australia is looking a bit sketchy now and us next door in New Zealand are feeling a little uncomfortable.
- threatripper 6y ago
  Sweden seems to get it under control now. Cases and deaths are falling quickly. In the beginning they made some big mistakes (in retrospect) but now the strategy seems to work (for now at least, we will see in a few months when the people get tired and want to return to normal life). OZ has a problem. NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1. Could you clarify this? I wasn't aware of any local transmission for months but I suspect an 'if' is missing from your sentence. I think that a full breakout takes a lot more than one error and it requires a whole chain of them and a lot of systems to fail. We have had errors like this. The battle now seems to be keeping those quarantine contained. There are near daily escape attempts and some are going to public places or covering significant distances.
    - makomk 6y ago
      I presume the comment you're replying to is referring to this case in Vietnam today: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/world/asia/coronavirus-vietnam.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/world/asia/coronavirus-vi... Elderly guy with no travel history who rarely even left his home and has no ties to any known potential source of infection, only discovered as a result of him being hospitalized - everything about this strongly suggests that containment has already failed and Vietnam just hasn't realized it yet. (Also, they waited a whole week after he was hospitalized and tested positive before publicly admitting that this had happened? Ouch. Most recent public social interaction prior to symptoms was visiting a hospital? Double ouch. I really hope this doesn't say what I suspect it does about what's happening in Vietnam right now.)
      - threatripper 6y ago
        Yes, this one. The one case we feared for months. It's like a little puff of smoke coming out of the roof.
      - nradov 6y ago
        Have they looked into transmission from animals?
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        The WHO reports that transmission from animals is known to have occurred among some mink farmers. Whether it can be transmitted from common domestic animals is unknown, although dogs and cats can definitely be infected. (https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses?gclid=CjwKCAjwsO_4BRBBEiwAyagRTdsB99FtoU3ZLwF8O15psCwznXtu0vpc7L1nbNfl575DS-8k-EgcThoCgjcQAvD_BwE#:~:text=pet https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...)
    - threatripper 6y ago
      The one error is the spark that starts the forest fire. Yes, the forest needs to be dry. But we don't want to carry all the water every day to keep it wet. The case here https://ncov.moh.gov.vn/ https://ncov.moh.gov.vn/ on "11:00 25/07/2020" seems to be a local transmission if the google translation is correct. The infection must have happened two weeks ago and they are currently contact tracing. Taking an average of 4 days, we are now on generation 2-3 of follow-up cases (or even more if the infection source/chain is older and has been spreading for a longer time). Let's hope that nobody else got infected and there are no asymptomatic patients running around by now, unaware that they are spreading it all over the country. Taking an R0 of 3 (since they don't have any hard measures right now), we are currently expect 3 * 3 * 3 cases if this person somehow got it from out of country. Finding those cases could take a bit of time and then we would look at 3 times more cases to find every 4 days. Assuming that some youngster got it and this older person is the first one to go to the doctor we could easily have 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 729 cases by now and that would probably already be out of control without instating a hard lockdown on all possibly affected regions and testing the whole population like China did.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    > Sweden seems to get it under control now. Cases and deaths are falling quickly. The death rate has been declining pretty much linearly since April. Restrictions were lighter than pretty much everywhere else in Europe, and have been successively loosened since they were implemented in March. But your comment implies that Sweden is "doing something" recently, and that there haven't been any results until recently either. And neither of that is true. > we will see in a few months when the people get tired and want to return to normal life Uh, it already is pretty much normal. There are signs everywhere reminding people to keep distance, restaurants have fewer tables than usual, and large gatherings are still banned, same as everywhere else. There never was a "reopen" debate in Sweden, because there wasn't really anything to reopen. But the media image of Sweden is incredibly distorted right now, it's pretty fascinating to watch what happens when a country goes against a major news narrative.
    - threatripper 6y ago
      I'm not IN Sweden, so I only have the media image. Can you comment on what measures have brought down the infection numbers? Why were they so high in the beginning and why are they falling so quickly now? After implementing measures it can take a few weeks to show results since detected cases can lag a lot behind actual infection events and there's local transmission chains (inside families/communities) that need to burn out before case numbers fall. Also speaking of measures, to my knowledge, the government did not take hard measures but rather suggested a lot of the same things that other countries put into law and the Swedish population is very compliant. So it is hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
      - henrikschroder 6y ago
        > Can you comment on what measures have brought down the infection numbers? Working from home, banning large gatherings, remote education for universities and secondary schools, reminders to keep the distance, table service only at restaurants and more space between tables. > the infection numbers? Sweden, like pretty much every other country, has no idea how large the number of unknown infections were back in March and April. The only certain numbers we have are ICU patients and deaths, and those have been declining constantly since mid-April. Presumably, actual cases follow the same curve. > Why were they so high in the beginning Exponential growth before any measures were taken. > why are they falling so quickly now? They're not falling quickly now, deaths and ICU patients have been falling linearly since mid-April. Death curve here: https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/ https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/ As to why, my best guess is that this virus simply wasn't much different from any other flu virus. A bit more deadly, but whatever measures people in Sweden took was enough to curb it. Also, herd immunity is probably much easier to achieve than earlier models suggest. Also, note that the death curves for Sweden and the UK are pretty much identical despite wildly different amount of restrictions implemented: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?country=SWE~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi... > After implementing measures it can take a few weeks to show results Yes, and actual analysis of mobility shows that people voluntarily took a lot of measures before actual recommendations were put into place. Same as everywhere else. Most EU countries implemented their lockdowns weeks after the peak. > Also speaking of measures, to my knowledge, the government did not take hard measures but rather suggested a lot of the same things that other countries put into law and the Swedish population is very compliant. Yes. That said, mobility dropped less in Sweden compared to neighbour countries who had stronger recommendations and rules in place. You can compare the mobility curves between countries at the bottom of this page: https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden > I'm not IN Sweden, so I only have the media image. I'm sorry, the media image is absolutely bananas. I have never seen such blatant bias to skew everything to make Sweden look like a zombie apocalypse to drum up support for lockdowns. But it looks like lockdowns are much less effective than people think. And it looks like a small amount of meaningful measures pushed the effects of this down to less than a regular flu season. Unmitigated, it would have been worse, but it's been mitigated everywhere, and here we are.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    > NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1. That's the problem with the NZ model of draconian lockdowns. Of course it can work, but only temporarily, and you can't stay locked down forever. I doubt the people of New Zealand are prepared to lock down over and over again every time the virus re-emerges. The Swedish model is one that people can live with for long periods of time.
  - darren_ 6y ago
    > NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1. Citation? I'm not seeing it on any of the usual NZ news sites, and I rather suspect it would be big news. edit: oh, i see, I've misparsed your sentence. VN is where the local transmission occurred, not NZ. nevermind.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      I made the same error - an alarmed scan of news sites resulted.
  - legolas2412 6y ago
    Hadn't China itself successfully eliminated the virus?

lostlogin 6y ago

> counties which seem to be doing very well until now may still fail horribly Sweden was an example of this, but Australia is looking a bit sketchy now and us next door in New Zealand are feeling a little uncomfortable.

threatripper 6y ago
Sweden seems to get it under control now. Cases and deaths are falling quickly. In the beginning they made some big mistakes (in retrospect) but now the strategy seems to work (for now at least, we will see in a few months when the people get tired and want to return to normal life). OZ has a problem. NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1. Could you clarify this? I wasn't aware of any local transmission for months but I suspect an 'if' is missing from your sentence. I think that a full breakout takes a lot more than one error and it requires a whole chain of them and a lot of systems to fail. We have had errors like this. The battle now seems to be keeping those quarantine contained. There are near daily escape attempts and some are going to public places or covering significant distances.
  - makomk 6y ago
    I presume the comment you're replying to is referring to this case in Vietnam today: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/world/asia/coronavirus-vietnam.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/world/asia/coronavirus-vi... Elderly guy with no travel history who rarely even left his home and has no ties to any known potential source of infection, only discovered as a result of him being hospitalized - everything about this strongly suggests that containment has already failed and Vietnam just hasn't realized it yet. (Also, they waited a whole week after he was hospitalized and tested positive before publicly admitting that this had happened? Ouch. Most recent public social interaction prior to symptoms was visiting a hospital? Double ouch. I really hope this doesn't say what I suspect it does about what's happening in Vietnam right now.)
    - threatripper 6y ago
      Yes, this one. The one case we feared for months. It's like a little puff of smoke coming out of the roof.
    - nradov 6y ago
      Have they looked into transmission from animals?
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        The WHO reports that transmission from animals is known to have occurred among some mink farmers. Whether it can be transmitted from common domestic animals is unknown, although dogs and cats can definitely be infected. (https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses?gclid=CjwKCAjwsO_4BRBBEiwAyagRTdsB99FtoU3ZLwF8O15psCwznXtu0vpc7L1nbNfl575DS-8k-EgcThoCgjcQAvD_BwE#:~:text=pet https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...)
  - threatripper 6y ago
    The one error is the spark that starts the forest fire. Yes, the forest needs to be dry. But we don't want to carry all the water every day to keep it wet. The case here https://ncov.moh.gov.vn/ https://ncov.moh.gov.vn/ on "11:00 25/07/2020" seems to be a local transmission if the google translation is correct. The infection must have happened two weeks ago and they are currently contact tracing. Taking an average of 4 days, we are now on generation 2-3 of follow-up cases (or even more if the infection source/chain is older and has been spreading for a longer time). Let's hope that nobody else got infected and there are no asymptomatic patients running around by now, unaware that they are spreading it all over the country. Taking an R0 of 3 (since they don't have any hard measures right now), we are currently expect 3 * 3 * 3 cases if this person somehow got it from out of country. Finding those cases could take a bit of time and then we would look at 3 times more cases to find every 4 days. Assuming that some youngster got it and this older person is the first one to go to the doctor we could easily have 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 729 cases by now and that would probably already be out of control without instating a hard lockdown on all possibly affected regions and testing the whole population like China did.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  > Sweden seems to get it under control now. Cases and deaths are falling quickly. The death rate has been declining pretty much linearly since April. Restrictions were lighter than pretty much everywhere else in Europe, and have been successively loosened since they were implemented in March. But your comment implies that Sweden is "doing something" recently, and that there haven't been any results until recently either. And neither of that is true. > we will see in a few months when the people get tired and want to return to normal life Uh, it already is pretty much normal. There are signs everywhere reminding people to keep distance, restaurants have fewer tables than usual, and large gatherings are still banned, same as everywhere else. There never was a "reopen" debate in Sweden, because there wasn't really anything to reopen. But the media image of Sweden is incredibly distorted right now, it's pretty fascinating to watch what happens when a country goes against a major news narrative.
  - threatripper 6y ago
    I'm not IN Sweden, so I only have the media image. Can you comment on what measures have brought down the infection numbers? Why were they so high in the beginning and why are they falling so quickly now? After implementing measures it can take a few weeks to show results since detected cases can lag a lot behind actual infection events and there's local transmission chains (inside families/communities) that need to burn out before case numbers fall. Also speaking of measures, to my knowledge, the government did not take hard measures but rather suggested a lot of the same things that other countries put into law and the Swedish population is very compliant. So it is hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
    - henrikschroder 6y ago
      > Can you comment on what measures have brought down the infection numbers? Working from home, banning large gatherings, remote education for universities and secondary schools, reminders to keep the distance, table service only at restaurants and more space between tables. > the infection numbers? Sweden, like pretty much every other country, has no idea how large the number of unknown infections were back in March and April. The only certain numbers we have are ICU patients and deaths, and those have been declining constantly since mid-April. Presumably, actual cases follow the same curve. > Why were they so high in the beginning Exponential growth before any measures were taken. > why are they falling so quickly now? They're not falling quickly now, deaths and ICU patients have been falling linearly since mid-April. Death curve here: https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/ https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/ As to why, my best guess is that this virus simply wasn't much different from any other flu virus. A bit more deadly, but whatever measures people in Sweden took was enough to curb it. Also, herd immunity is probably much easier to achieve than earlier models suggest. Also, note that the death curves for Sweden and the UK are pretty much identical despite wildly different amount of restrictions implemented: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?country=SWE~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi... > After implementing measures it can take a few weeks to show results Yes, and actual analysis of mobility shows that people voluntarily took a lot of measures before actual recommendations were put into place. Same as everywhere else. Most EU countries implemented their lockdowns weeks after the peak. > Also speaking of measures, to my knowledge, the government did not take hard measures but rather suggested a lot of the same things that other countries put into law and the Swedish population is very compliant. Yes. That said, mobility dropped less in Sweden compared to neighbour countries who had stronger recommendations and rules in place. You can compare the mobility curves between countries at the bottom of this page: https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden > I'm not IN Sweden, so I only have the media image. I'm sorry, the media image is absolutely bananas. I have never seen such blatant bias to skew everything to make Sweden look like a zombie apocalypse to drum up support for lockdowns. But it looks like lockdowns are much less effective than people think. And it looks like a small amount of meaningful measures pushed the effects of this down to less than a regular flu season. Unmitigated, it would have been worse, but it's been mitigated everywhere, and here we are.
- twblalock 6y ago
  > NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1. That's the problem with the NZ model of draconian lockdowns. Of course it can work, but only temporarily, and you can't stay locked down forever. I doubt the people of New Zealand are prepared to lock down over and over again every time the virus re-emerges. The Swedish model is one that people can live with for long periods of time.
- darren_ 6y ago
  > NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1. Citation? I'm not seeing it on any of the usual NZ news sites, and I rather suspect it would be big news. edit: oh, i see, I've misparsed your sentence. VN is where the local transmission occurred, not NZ. nevermind.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    I made the same error - an alarmed scan of news sites resulted.
- legolas2412 6y ago
  Hadn't China itself successfully eliminated the virus?