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Covid: Belgian doctors with coronavirus asked to keep working
- bichonnages 6y agoLike in many other countries, unfortunately.
- christkv 6y agoThe infections are spiking but for example in Madrid the number of hospital beds with covid patients is holding steady at 19% (as of October 23). https://www.epdata.es/datos/evolucion-coronavirus-cada-comunidad/518/madrid/304 https://www.epdata.es/datos/evolucion-coronavirus-cada-comun... So many people are getting ill but a lot less are ending up in hospital than March-April. I find the discussion about number of cases to be a distraction.
- Barrin92 6y agonot sure why you're being downvoted. The situation right now is much better than it was during the first wave. (https://imgur.com/nDgb7d7 https://imgur.com/nDgb7d7, representative of most countries)
- christkv 6y agoPeople don't like information that contradicts their convictions. You question the "narrative" and they get upset. Somehow epidemiology became a political question I guess in the us.
- chrisco255 6y agoWell, it's an election year, unfortunately.
- kgwgk 6y ago"much better" may be a matter of opinion but it's definitely getting worse. There are 2500 patients in intensive care in France. Far from the 7000 at the peak but they were just 1000 one month ago and 1500 two weeks ago.
- dragontamer 6y agoThe pipeline is cases -> hospitalizations -> deaths, with a week or 2-weeks between each stage. Only 20% of cases turn into hospitalizations, and only a small percentage of hospitalizations turn into deaths... but that's the general pipeline. The exact % changes depending on population dynamics (who gets sick, and where), but the biggest contributing factor is the number of people in the previous stage of the pipeline. (If you double cases, then a few weeks later, hospitalizations will almost certainly double). If a case-spike happens, the idea is to make a decision BEFORE hospitalization spikes up a few weeks later. We want to be ahead of the wave, not behind it.
- christkv 6y agoWell I'm saying the Madrid numbers are not bearing out the prognosis you are outlining. It could be younger people are getting ill and that elderly people are better isolated but it's hard to know because they don't provide deaths by age groups.
- dragontamer 6y agoMy spanish isn't the best, but with assistance from Google Translate, I'm able to line up the death-charts with the cases charts. https://imgur.com/cJw6dTk.png https://imgur.com/cJw6dTk.png If I'm reading that spanish correctly: its "Number of daily cases" (casos diarios) on the top, with "number of deaths" (Muertos) on the bottom, both in Madrid alone. ---------- The first wave is clearly wreaked by undertesting the population: Spain probably just didn't have enough tests to really count the cases back then. But for the 2nd wave (going until today), the death numbers clearly went up a few weeks after the case-count went up. The case-count has begun to decline in Madrid, I think they're "over the hump" (knock on wood...). So looking forward, they're in a good spot. But you can clearly see: when cases go up, deaths go up soon afterwards. When cases go down, the deaths go down soon afterwards.
- slimed 6y ago!remindme 2 weeks
- Joeri 6y agoThe article is about hospitals filled with coronavirus patients to the point they have to turn away new patients. Did you read any of it?
- Cantbekhan 6y agoTo be fair in Belgium it's not about infections. It's about actual hospital beds and hospitals reaching saturation. So this article is actually about hospital beds and not about cases.
- tremon 6y agoThe infections are spiking Not in Madrid. From your own link, the number of new cases in Madrid has been holding steady around 2,500-3,500 for a month now [0]. Since the average hospital stay for Covid-19 is around 20 days, the in-flow and out-flow of patients in hospital beds should reach a steady state. In fact, you can see from [1] that the number of new cases was higher in september than in october, so we should expect to see a slight decline in hospital occupation over the first few weeks of october, which is exactly what the charts show [2]. So if you start your post with a falsehood, what value does the rest of your post have? [0] https://www.epdata.es/casos-diarios-coronavirus-lugar-ultimos-30-dias/63135201-4da0-4ae6-984d-b8fa23081b93/madrid/304 https://www.epdata.es/casos-diarios-coronavirus-lugar-ultimo... [1] https://www.epdata.es/evolucion-nuevos-casos-diarios-coronavirus-lugar/29516c77-99da-4cdd-a63a-ce3e7c5ae259/madrid/304 https://www.epdata.es/evolucion-nuevos-casos-diarios-coronav... [2] https://www.epdata.es/porcentaje-camas-hospital-ocupadas-pacientes-covid-19/017cb1e2-0528-4c56-9161-e640995747d1/madrid/304 https://www.epdata.es/porcentaje-camas-hospital-ocupadas-pac...
- Jare 6y agoThe amount of tests performed in Madrid in that same period went down from 2500 to nearly 1000, so it's only natural that the amount of cases is going to go down or stay steady. Is there a dataset that disputes this? If testing has indeed gone back up, we'll see the numbers in a week or two (because data from the past 2 weeks is always missing large chunks that get added later). I believe we're still in for a few surprises, and I can only pray the magnitude of those surprises remains tolerable.
- Insanity 6y agoBelgian here, the covid situation is being handled very poorly. The rules change frequently and are badly communicated, the three main regions (Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia) all have different set of rules and information is contradicting. E.g Flanders: Schools are not a problem vs Wallonia: Schools are a problem. It's frustrating to see.
- thisiszilff 6y agoWell, good to know it is not just the US.
- hyperman1 6y agoI agree the handling by our politicians seems incompetent, visionless, after the fact, ... But I have the impression Belgium is not unique here. Most of the first world is doing bad. I get the impression our political generation is systemically mismanaging for at least 20 years, and this crisis is the first of a level that makes it extremely obvious in all our countrys at the same time.
- LockAndLol 6y ago> I get the impression our political generation is systemically mismanaging for at least 20 years, and this crisis is the first of a level that makes it extremely obvious in all our countrys at the same time. The new generation won't be any better. There simply aren't enough people who care enough to enter politics or do something about the situation. The system hasn't changed and the people that enter politics will still largely be those who do it for personal gain. We all like to complain, but the majority won't do a thing because it cares more about which series, useless gadget or trend was released recently. And when we (the majority) do go to the polls, we vote for personal gain, not for the good of others.
- kentrado 6y agoWe are overworked, tired, and they have all of the resources.
- 6y ago
- mxyzplk 6y agoThey don't want to seem like they're waffling... ZING!
- cultus 6y agoTrump gets most of the attention, but this whole pandemic has laid plain how liberal republics have been hollowed out by neoliberalism over the past few decades. The capability for broad, fast, collective action has been all-but wiped out, even in the supposedly enlightened and well-run countries of Western Europe. The nations that defeated fascism are crippled by a far weaker threat. I can't think of another liberal democracy besides NZ that has handled COVID well, and they are a small island country. It's embarrassing, because the response has been terrible on both purely financial and humanitarian levels.
- jb1991 6y agoIceland has done relatively well from what I've read.
- PunchTornado 6y agoIceland is a remote island of 300k people with very low density. Giving it as an example is disingenuous.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoGood point regarding population density. I don't see the case for calling the GP disingenuous though.
- kingofpandora 6y agoBut most of the population is concentrated in a rather small area, which national-level population density statics don't capture.
- monoideism 6y agoNotably, and obviously, all 3 examples mentioned in this thread are islands (NZ, Aus, and Iceland). That seems like more than coincidence.
- axolttl88 6y ago
- makomk 6y agoThings are going really badly Covid-wise throughout Europe right now, and there doesn't seem to be a plausible path to stopping it. Even lockdowns are increasingly politically and socially non-viable. I suspect it might not be obvious over in the US because the press only seems to run comparisons which make the US look like a unique failure due to Trump for election-related reasons. (Seriously. It was amazing watching, for example, the New York Times switch from downplaying the severity of Spain's outbreak compared to Florida to ignoring it to turning the country's politics into a Trump analogue once the disaster became undeniable - and if I recall correctly this was ostensibly news, not editorial. France looks like it could potentially end up reporting more cases than the entire US in the not-so-distant future, and I don't know how the press will cope with that.)
- slaw 6y agoSweden and Belarus handled pandemic by not doing lockdowns. In Sweden for the last 3 months only 0-3 people a day die with covid-19. There is no second wave like in other European countries. https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se
- justusw 6y agoInteresting to hear about Belarus. Did you find more resources that detail their approach to dealing with COVID-19?
- harambae 6y agoNot sure if this is what you're looking for or not, but Belarus nightclubs are still open: https://djtechtools.com/2020/07/27/clubbing-in-the-covid-19-era-how-5-eastern-european-countries-are-reacting-to-coronavirus/ https://djtechtools.com/2020/07/27/clubbing-in-the-covid-19-... (I have friends in Belarus who have confirmed this as well) I have to imagine any place with nightclubs open indoors doesn't care too much anywhere.
- soco 6y agoGiven all the street fights and unrest in Belarus I really don't know what to think of their official numbers - like in any dictatorship, there might a great deal of "lets make it look good to the world" in there.
- masak 6y agoI know the Swedish like to repeat that there is no second wave like in the other European countries, but... I've been looking at this graph for the past few weeks: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?country=~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr... Now, it might be that the new cases this time are less severe, I don't know. But it's a second wave.
- jariel 6y ago??? 1) The data you showed literally displays a full blown tidal wave 'second wave' hitting Sweden, 1500 cases/day in a country of 8M people and growing exponentially is absolutely a 'second wave'. Seriously, what are you looking at? That rate of expansion, if not controlled with further social modifications, will overwhelm the country in about 3 weeks. (Remember that quite some number of people need to be hospitalized, that the hospitals have to refuse other patients, that it will force other lockdowns, and it eventually will trickle to the older people - who will die.) 2) Sweden avoided an 'initial lockdown' but most countries only did a 'lock down' for several weeks. Otherwise, a lot of the de-facto policies have been quite similar. As of 4 weeks ago I suggest Sweden was 'on par' with the rest of the Western world.
- jariel 6y agoIt's obviously a bad sign if they are even thinking of resorting to this ... the 'second wave lockdowns' are a failure of leadership in most of the West. The '1st wave' was understandable - crude measures in an emergency, fair enough. But should have a much more nuanced understanding of the situation by now, and be able to focus on smart but clear policies. There was a 'sweet spot' coming out of the lockdowns that would work well, but we moved past it, and how we're playing a game of 'back and forth'. For example, we probably don't need lockdowns or curfews at all, they are a little totalitarian and probably do nothing but get people super mad. We probably need to stop social gatherings of all kinds, limit social bubbles to nuclear units. On TikTok I see way, way too much intermingling among especially young people who are unambiguously driving the second wave. We also probably need to support our local businesses as we can and 'keep things moving' i.e. 'Remember to Get Takeout'. In Canada Unis opened up, there were house parties, dorm parties, bars with drunk student what the goddam hell were they thinking? How about: nobody in your house/dorm unless they live there, 'outdoor beer gardens' only, limit 2 beers. Have a 'dance party' in a big open parking lot to break the social malaise. Otherwise threaten expel students who break the established rules for putting other people's lives at risk. We have almost stopped talking about 'isolation' and we have no support for it. In Taiwan, they send you home, show up at your door with masks, call you every day to check up on you. That kind of 'nudging' would be hugely impactful, it's also a form of tracing.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> The '1st wave' was understandable - crude measures in an emergency, fair enough. The US is largely still in a rolling first wave; the separate nation-wide peaks are the result of the fact that not everywhere got hit at the same time, so, e.g., New York had hit it's first peak and bent things downward before much of the country had even noticeably been hit at all. There's some places that are in genuine second waves, but much of the country is still experience it's first wave (often in a post-lockdown climb after a lockdown-generated plateau.)
- jariel 6y agoThat's a great point - US overall looks like it's in a '3rd wave' but really, the 2cnd blip was due to different states hitting at different times. However - if you break down by state - it looks fairly clearly that we are in a '2cnd wave' of a totally different kind: it's younger people driving the infections, and the case fatality rate is a lot lower.