3 ms·

Lots of New Zealand's neighbors are orders of magnitude less than Europe and the Americas, also, so it's not clear what to make of that. However, I think the r

Lots of New Zealand's neighbors are orders of magnitude less than Europe and the Americas, also, so it's not clear what to make of that. However, I think the rationale for using only countries with > 100 deaths would be that it's not looking at how to prevent things from starting, but rather what strategies are effective once they've already gotten seriously going (which was already the situation for many countries a year ago).

sitharus 6y ago
New Zealand did have serious local spread last March, our R value was over 2. We’ve never been able to completely prevent Covid-19 outbreaks.
tsimionescu 6y ago
It also excludes Vietnam, a country with 100M bordering China, with the first evidence of community spread outside of China, which has experienced a total of 35 deaths so far in the pandemic. They also credit their success to effective lockdowns and contact tracing (tracing up to 3 degrees of connection, so typically putting more than 100 people in isolation for every case identified). Edit: fixed geographical mistake :).
- jandrewrogers 6y ago
  FWIW, by all accounts (I have family there), COVID is endemic in Viet Nam but simply isn't reported. Lots of elderly people were seriously ill with unusual "pneumonia" but the government doesn't test them. The sick people with likely COVID were being turned away from the hospitals, so many traveled to their family homes in the countryside. COVID doesn't exist because they refuse to measure it. Which is about what you'd expect there.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    I don't have any family or other contacts there personally, but everything I've read about it completely contradicts what you are saying. The WHO and UN and foreign media organizations have had nothing but praise for their COVID-19 response, except for accusations of human rights violations in other areas. So I don't think your "by all accounts" comment is justifiable in any way. Here is an excerpt from a WHO report [0]: > Early activation of a strong response system, including surveillance and risk assessment, laboratory, clinical management and IPC, and risk communication, which enabled Viet Nam’s successful control of COVID-19. Here is the UN summary [1]: > Viet Nam’s response to the health system aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most effective in the world and this is now increasingly recognized at the global policy level. The country has now controlled the virus and pandemic multiple times including the recent outbreaks which started in Da Nang on July 25, 2020 after the country had achieved 99 clear days of freedom from local transmission of the COVID-19 virus Here is Reuters reporting about this [2]: > “It is organised, it can make country-wide policy decisions that get enacted quickly and efficiently and without too much controversy,” said Guy Thwaites, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. Thwaites’s laboratory has been helping to process tests. > Thwaites said the number of positive tests processed by his organisation’s lab was in line with government data. He said the hospital where he works on the wards – Ho Chi Minh City’s 550-bed Hospital for Tropical Diseases, serving a population of 45 million people in southern Vietnam – had not admitted any additional cases not reflected in the government’s numbers. Here is the BBC [3]: > Speckled among the praise showered on Vietnam for its handling of Covid-19 were some questions about the accuracy of the authoritarian state's data, which medical and diplomatic communities had widely agreed was reliable. > "The new deaths reported shows that there is transparency in reporting Covid-19 in Vietnam and that previous 'no deaths' should have not been questioned in the first place," Dr Huong Le Thu, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, tells the BBC. [0] file:///C:/Users/ionut/AppData/Local/Temp/Viet-Nam-MOH-WHO-COVID-19-Sitrep_(7Mar2021)_final.pdf [1] https://vietnam.un.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/UN%20Assessment%20on%20the%20Social%20and%20Ecnomic%20Impact%20of%20COVID-19%20in%20Viet%20Nam_merged.pdf https://vietnam.un.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/UN%20Asse... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietnam-fight-insi/after-aggressive-mass-testing-vietnam-says-it-contains-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN22B34H https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietna... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53690711 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53690711
    - jandrewrogers 6y ago
      Several members of the extended family in different parts of the country had unambiguous symptomatic COVID cases. Every last one was 1) never tested and 2) even the people with severe cases were turned away by the government hospitals, not even a cursory exam. You can get into the hospitals and get tested with a sufficiently large bribe, but the market clearing price for that bribe was unusually high so few people can afford it. The practical reality is that the government hospitals couldn't do anything even if you paid it, so why would you? People with enough money to pay that bribe would be using the foreign hospitals anyway. Initially they did do severe lockdowns but the virus escaped into the population not long after and it was a lost cause. Realize that even though the lockdowns were severe, just about every such mandate is optional if you have money, both in theory and practice. The above reporting isn't particularly credible. Having worked for the UN and been involved in the sausage-making at international NGOs, it would be a mistake to treat their outputs as a scientific fact-finding mission. Outputs are virtually always in service of narrow political or economic objectives that may be unrelated to the topic of the report, they aren't written for the purpose of conveying information per se. It is a formal writing style that makes heavy use of selective omissions. Some countries were successful at containing COVID. In the specific case of Viet Nam, it would take a relatively naive review of the evidence to come to that conclusion. It may be authoritarian but it is much more corrupt and disorganized than many of the other "hard lockdown" countries.
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
        Once again you claim all of this very forcefully from personal experience, but I haven't been able to find a single source which agrees with your story. I highly doubt that all of US and European media is collaborating with the Vietnamese authorities to hide their death toll - it is far more likely that the reports you have seen are colored by local political biases and conspiracy mongering. I'm open to the possibility that they are cooking their numbers somewhat, as all authoritarian regimes are inclined to do, but it simply can't happen to the extent you are claiming without becoming at least a well-known conspiracy. Especially given that Viet Nam is not some great friend of the the US or Europe (say, a Saudi Arabia).
    - 6y ago

sitharus 6y ago

New Zealand did have serious local spread last March, our R value was over 2. We’ve never been able to completely prevent Covid-19 outbreaks.

tsimionescu 6y ago

It also excludes Vietnam, a country with 100M bordering China, with the first evidence of community spread outside of China, which has experienced a total of 35 deaths so far in the pandemic. They also credit their success to effective lockdowns and contact tracing (tracing up to 3 degrees of connection, so typically putting more than 100 people in isolation for every case identified). Edit: fixed geographical mistake :).

jandrewrogers 6y ago
FWIW, by all accounts (I have family there), COVID is endemic in Viet Nam but simply isn't reported. Lots of elderly people were seriously ill with unusual "pneumonia" but the government doesn't test them. The sick people with likely COVID were being turned away from the hospitals, so many traveled to their family homes in the countryside. COVID doesn't exist because they refuse to measure it. Which is about what you'd expect there.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  I don't have any family or other contacts there personally, but everything I've read about it completely contradicts what you are saying. The WHO and UN and foreign media organizations have had nothing but praise for their COVID-19 response, except for accusations of human rights violations in other areas. So I don't think your "by all accounts" comment is justifiable in any way. Here is an excerpt from a WHO report [0]: > Early activation of a strong response system, including surveillance and risk assessment, laboratory, clinical management and IPC, and risk communication, which enabled Viet Nam’s successful control of COVID-19. Here is the UN summary [1]: > Viet Nam’s response to the health system aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most effective in the world and this is now increasingly recognized at the global policy level. The country has now controlled the virus and pandemic multiple times including the recent outbreaks which started in Da Nang on July 25, 2020 after the country had achieved 99 clear days of freedom from local transmission of the COVID-19 virus Here is Reuters reporting about this [2]: > “It is organised, it can make country-wide policy decisions that get enacted quickly and efficiently and without too much controversy,” said Guy Thwaites, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. Thwaites’s laboratory has been helping to process tests. > Thwaites said the number of positive tests processed by his organisation’s lab was in line with government data. He said the hospital where he works on the wards – Ho Chi Minh City’s 550-bed Hospital for Tropical Diseases, serving a population of 45 million people in southern Vietnam – had not admitted any additional cases not reflected in the government’s numbers. Here is the BBC [3]: > Speckled among the praise showered on Vietnam for its handling of Covid-19 were some questions about the accuracy of the authoritarian state's data, which medical and diplomatic communities had widely agreed was reliable. > "The new deaths reported shows that there is transparency in reporting Covid-19 in Vietnam and that previous 'no deaths' should have not been questioned in the first place," Dr Huong Le Thu, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, tells the BBC. [0] file:///C:/Users/ionut/AppData/Local/Temp/Viet-Nam-MOH-WHO-COVID-19-Sitrep_(7Mar2021)_final.pdf [1] https://vietnam.un.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/UN%20Assessment%20on%20the%20Social%20and%20Ecnomic%20Impact%20of%20COVID-19%20in%20Viet%20Nam_merged.pdf https://vietnam.un.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/UN%20Asse... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietnam-fight-insi/after-aggressive-mass-testing-vietnam-says-it-contains-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN22B34H https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietna... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53690711 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53690711
  - jandrewrogers 6y ago
    Several members of the extended family in different parts of the country had unambiguous symptomatic COVID cases. Every last one was 1) never tested and 2) even the people with severe cases were turned away by the government hospitals, not even a cursory exam. You can get into the hospitals and get tested with a sufficiently large bribe, but the market clearing price for that bribe was unusually high so few people can afford it. The practical reality is that the government hospitals couldn't do anything even if you paid it, so why would you? People with enough money to pay that bribe would be using the foreign hospitals anyway. Initially they did do severe lockdowns but the virus escaped into the population not long after and it was a lost cause. Realize that even though the lockdowns were severe, just about every such mandate is optional if you have money, both in theory and practice. The above reporting isn't particularly credible. Having worked for the UN and been involved in the sausage-making at international NGOs, it would be a mistake to treat their outputs as a scientific fact-finding mission. Outputs are virtually always in service of narrow political or economic objectives that may be unrelated to the topic of the report, they aren't written for the purpose of conveying information per se. It is a formal writing style that makes heavy use of selective omissions. Some countries were successful at containing COVID. In the specific case of Viet Nam, it would take a relatively naive review of the evidence to come to that conclusion. It may be authoritarian but it is much more corrupt and disorganized than many of the other "hard lockdown" countries.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      Once again you claim all of this very forcefully from personal experience, but I haven't been able to find a single source which agrees with your story. I highly doubt that all of US and European media is collaborating with the Vietnamese authorities to hide their death toll - it is far more likely that the reports you have seen are colored by local political biases and conspiracy mongering. I'm open to the possibility that they are cooking their numbers somewhat, as all authoritarian regimes are inclined to do, but it simply can't happen to the extent you are claiming without becoming at least a well-known conspiracy. Especially given that Viet Nam is not some great friend of the the US or Europe (say, a Saudi Arabia).
  - 6y ago