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that's because it's an island. All the islands are doing better than whole continents. You can't contain it unless you go full bore like the chinese - locking

by starkd 6y ago

that's because it's an island. All the islands are doing better than whole continents. You can't contain it unless you go full bore like the chinese - locking people into their homes.

GregarianChild 6y ago
The UK is no island?
- rualca 6y ago
  > The UK is no island? An island that has high-speed railway connections to Europe is not exactly isolated from the world, not to mention it's ferry connections with multiple neighboring countries in mainland Europe. Additionally, Great Britain has about 3 times the population of Taiwan, and it's urban centers have between 5 and 7x the population of Taiwan's largest urban centers.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    Sure, but all the points of entry to Britain have border controls. If the government ordered the channel tunnel to stop, it would stop. It's not like France, where there are innumerable border crossing points. Of course a total closure would be a last resort, because that would cut off imports of things like fresh fruit, but it's been possible to get 20-minute pinprick blood tests since April (admittedly with lower accuracy than PCR tests) - the government simply decided measures like testing everyone at the border and enforcing mandatory self-isolation were not priorities.
    - stordoff 6y ago
      > If the government ordered the channel tunnel to stop, it would stop. [...] Of course a total closure would be a last resort, because that would cut off imports of things like fresh fruit As demonstrated by the recent French closure: > French President Emmanuel Macron went further Sunday, with France barring UK travelers and shutting down the Eurotunnel crossing for at least 48 hours, meaning thousands of trucks carrying goods to the continent will not be able to cross the English Channel. https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-border-chaos-after-france-closes-eurotunnel-bans-lorries-for-forty-eight-hours-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-border-chaos-after-france... You now require a negative test (PCR or antigen) within the last 7 3 hours, and must be within a permitted category of traveller - https://uk.ambafrance.org/France-to-admit-some-travellers-from-UK-following-suspension https://uk.ambafrance.org/France-to-admit-some-travellers-fr...
scarmig 6y ago
I find this argument unconvincing. The UK is an island, and it's doing badly. "But it's highly connected with the rest of the world, so it makes it honorarily a non-island!" Okay, sure. How about South Korea? It isn't an island, and it's doing pretty well. "But it's de facto an island, it's not getting cases from North Korea!" Okay, sure. But by that standard the US is an island: it didn't get its cases from Mexico or Canada. And, of course, China has more land borders than any other country in the world, and it's managed to engineer the most drastic turnaround of any country in the world. Having a small number of entry points is useful to limit initial inoculations, but internal policy and cultural cohesion are key for preventing the explosion of any successful inoculation into national disaster, regardless of a polity's geography.
- irq11 6y ago
  > How about South Korea? It isn’t an island, and it’s doing pretty well. Cases are at all-time highs, and have pretty much escalated out of control: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020/12/25/s-korea-reports-record-covid-surge-despite-tough-distancing-rules https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020...
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    All-time high being around 1000 cases per day in a country of 50M, and they haven't given up yet -- they've successfully beaten back two previous waves.
    - irq11 6y ago
      “all-time high“ meaning “all-time high“...and continuing to accelerate. I love the way you keep shifting the goalposts. When you’re shown that they haven’t controlled the virus, you pretend that it matters what the absolute magnitude of the case count is today. To wit: “You just don’t understand exponential growth!” By the way, Korea has tested about 2M people, total, or about the same number of tests that the US did yesterday. So yeah...they’re probably finding a few less cases: http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/en http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/en
howlgarnish 6y ago
Sigh, this old canard again. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore are all doing fine without "locking people into their homes" and they're not islands. (Ok, Singapore technically is an island but it's connected to Malaysia by the world's busiest border crossing; and Thailand's grappling with a new outbreak now but it seems to be improving.)
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  > Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia I guess perfect covid policy is contagious!
- harimau777 6y ago
  Is it possible that they are all effectively islands? For example, it appears that Vietnam has miles of jungle between its major cities and neighboring countries. The same cannot be said for the US and Europe.
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    Those miles of jungle are crisscrossed by roads, trains and ferries, just like US and Europe. Vietnam is a country of nearly 100M people with strong trade and transport links to the world, and over in Thailand, Bangkok is the most popular tourist destination in the world.
    - rndgermandude 6y ago
      There is very little tourism right now, ever since this started. But before that, Vietnam (population 97M) had close to 20M international arrivals last year, Germany (population 83M) had 39M, Thailand (population 70M) had 40M. Vietnam has essentially one train line across the county that only splits up in the very north into two train lines into China. Vietnam has 2,600km of train lines, Germany for comparison has more than 41,000km, for a comparable area size. Vietnam has about 12M train passenger rides a year (pre-Corona of course), Germany has more than 2000M (does not include intra-city light rail rides). Thailand, with an area about 1.5x of either Vietnam or Germany, has 4,400km of train lines and 38M passenger rides. Vietnam has about 250,000km of roads (50% paved), Germany has 600,000km (mostly paved). Vietnam has about 3M motorized vehicles (31 per 1000 population, but there is probably a significant number of unaccounted motor scooters), Germany has 56M motorized vehicles (701 per 1000), Thailand has 40M motorized vehicles (half being motor scooters/bikes, probably a significant number of unaccounted motor scooters) (571 per 1000). You said "just like the US or EU", but I disagree given these numbers. The mobility, especially medium and long distance mobility, seem quite different. Public life - as dictated by climate conditions and of course economic constraints - differs as well. Average temperature in Vietnam is 24°C, Thailand 26°C and Germany 9°C (and Spain/Greece/Italy aka the South of Europe it's 13°C). A lot more public life, incl paid and unpaid work, happens outside in Vietnam and Thailand, compared to Europe. When it was summer in Europe, we had a lot fewer cases and deaths than when it was cold and is now cold again. Colder weather and indoor living/working seems to heavily correlate with Corona, at least in Europe. This doesn't mean we cannot learn from nations such as Vietnam and Thailand, but it's also not as straight forward as trying to outright mimic what they did and do in response to the pandemic.

by starkd 6y ago

that's because it's an island. All the islands are doing better than whole continents. You can't contain it unless you go full bore like the chinese - locking people into their homes.

GregarianChild 6y ago

The UK is no island?

rualca 6y ago
> The UK is no island? An island that has high-speed railway connections to Europe is not exactly isolated from the world, not to mention it's ferry connections with multiple neighboring countries in mainland Europe. Additionally, Great Britain has about 3 times the population of Taiwan, and it's urban centers have between 5 and 7x the population of Taiwan's largest urban centers.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Sure, but all the points of entry to Britain have border controls. If the government ordered the channel tunnel to stop, it would stop. It's not like France, where there are innumerable border crossing points. Of course a total closure would be a last resort, because that would cut off imports of things like fresh fruit, but it's been possible to get 20-minute pinprick blood tests since April (admittedly with lower accuracy than PCR tests) - the government simply decided measures like testing everyone at the border and enforcing mandatory self-isolation were not priorities.
  - stordoff 6y ago
    > If the government ordered the channel tunnel to stop, it would stop. [...] Of course a total closure would be a last resort, because that would cut off imports of things like fresh fruit As demonstrated by the recent French closure: > French President Emmanuel Macron went further Sunday, with France barring UK travelers and shutting down the Eurotunnel crossing for at least 48 hours, meaning thousands of trucks carrying goods to the continent will not be able to cross the English Channel. https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-border-chaos-after-france-closes-eurotunnel-bans-lorries-for-forty-eight-hours-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-border-chaos-after-france... You now require a negative test (PCR or antigen) within the last 7 3 hours, and must be within a permitted category of traveller - https://uk.ambafrance.org/France-to-admit-some-travellers-from-UK-following-suspension https://uk.ambafrance.org/France-to-admit-some-travellers-fr...

scarmig 6y ago

I find this argument unconvincing. The UK is an island, and it's doing badly. "But it's highly connected with the rest of the world, so it makes it honorarily a non-island!" Okay, sure. How about South Korea? It isn't an island, and it's doing pretty well. "But it's de facto an island, it's not getting cases from North Korea!" Okay, sure. But by that standard the US is an island: it didn't get its cases from Mexico or Canada. And, of course, China has more land borders than any other country in the world, and it's managed to engineer the most drastic turnaround of any country in the world. Having a small number of entry points is useful to limit initial inoculations, but internal policy and cultural cohesion are key for preventing the explosion of any successful inoculation into national disaster, regardless of a polity's geography.

irq11 6y ago
> How about South Korea? It isn’t an island, and it’s doing pretty well. Cases are at all-time highs, and have pretty much escalated out of control: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020/12/25/s-korea-reports-record-covid-surge-despite-tough-distancing-rules https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020...
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  All-time high being around 1000 cases per day in a country of 50M, and they haven't given up yet -- they've successfully beaten back two previous waves.
  - irq11 6y ago
    “all-time high“ meaning “all-time high“...and continuing to accelerate. I love the way you keep shifting the goalposts. When you’re shown that they haven’t controlled the virus, you pretend that it matters what the absolute magnitude of the case count is today. To wit: “You just don’t understand exponential growth!” By the way, Korea has tested about 2M people, total, or about the same number of tests that the US did yesterday. So yeah...they’re probably finding a few less cases: http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/en http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/en

howlgarnish 6y ago

Sigh, this old canard again. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore are all doing fine without "locking people into their homes" and they're not islands. (Ok, Singapore technically is an island but it's connected to Malaysia by the world's busiest border crossing; and Thailand's grappling with a new outbreak now but it seems to be improving.)

jdminhbg 6y ago
> Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia I guess perfect covid policy is contagious!
harimau777 6y ago
Is it possible that they are all effectively islands? For example, it appears that Vietnam has miles of jungle between its major cities and neighboring countries. The same cannot be said for the US and Europe.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Those miles of jungle are crisscrossed by roads, trains and ferries, just like US and Europe. Vietnam is a country of nearly 100M people with strong trade and transport links to the world, and over in Thailand, Bangkok is the most popular tourist destination in the world.
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    There is very little tourism right now, ever since this started. But before that, Vietnam (population 97M) had close to 20M international arrivals last year, Germany (population 83M) had 39M, Thailand (population 70M) had 40M. Vietnam has essentially one train line across the county that only splits up in the very north into two train lines into China. Vietnam has 2,600km of train lines, Germany for comparison has more than 41,000km, for a comparable area size. Vietnam has about 12M train passenger rides a year (pre-Corona of course), Germany has more than 2000M (does not include intra-city light rail rides). Thailand, with an area about 1.5x of either Vietnam or Germany, has 4,400km of train lines and 38M passenger rides. Vietnam has about 250,000km of roads (50% paved), Germany has 600,000km (mostly paved). Vietnam has about 3M motorized vehicles (31 per 1000 population, but there is probably a significant number of unaccounted motor scooters), Germany has 56M motorized vehicles (701 per 1000), Thailand has 40M motorized vehicles (half being motor scooters/bikes, probably a significant number of unaccounted motor scooters) (571 per 1000). You said "just like the US or EU", but I disagree given these numbers. The mobility, especially medium and long distance mobility, seem quite different. Public life - as dictated by climate conditions and of course economic constraints - differs as well. Average temperature in Vietnam is 24°C, Thailand 26°C and Germany 9°C (and Spain/Greece/Italy aka the South of Europe it's 13°C). A lot more public life, incl paid and unpaid work, happens outside in Vietnam and Thailand, compared to Europe. When it was summer in Europe, we had a lot fewer cases and deaths than when it was cold and is now cold again. Colder weather and indoor living/working seems to heavily correlate with Corona, at least in Europe. This doesn't mean we cannot learn from nations such as Vietnam and Thailand, but it's also not as straight forward as trying to outright mimic what they did and do in response to the pandemic.