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To me this shows how hard to predict the whole thing is. Germany did well for a long time and suddenly they got hit like everybody else. Same for India. Seems

• makomk 6y ago
  Yeah, and the Czech Republic, which used to be the big European success story which proved everyone else should be able to do better, ended up with the most Covid-19 deaths per capita in Europe (maybe in the world, can't remember). So many confident predictions failed and then were quietly forgotten.
  • AndrewBissell 6y ago
    Specifically, the Czechs were praised for their early and aggressive mask mandates and compliance rates, which were credited with keeping their infection rate lower than European neighbors.
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      Unfortunately, once no Armageddon happened, the population got tired of the restrictions and the politicians followed. Then, the British variant arrived and here we are, world champions in deaths per thousand people.
      • AndrewBissell 6y ago
        It's almost like these interventions can't be maintained indefinitely and are therefore stopgaps at best. With the CDC's own study saying masks reduce transmission by all of 2%, I doubt it was lack of mask wearing that made the difference. There's still no Armageddon happening anywhere.
        • NationalPark 6y ago
          Please stop posting lies about the effectiveness of masks. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536
          • AndrewBissell 6y ago
            Your own link has several studies with numbers in the same ballpark as what I cited. Here's the CDC study: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm
            • dehrmann 6y ago
              Here's the "2%." https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm#F1_down https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm#F1_down It's "percentage point change," which I read as absolute percentage points. It's different from you what said, "masks reduce transmission by all of 2%," but it also looks like a garbage number because you can't average percents like that and get meaningful data, and the result is hard to interpret. If masks drop the growth rate by 2 percentage point, two percentage points from what?
• lr4444lr 6y ago
  South Korea and Taiwan had super strict lockdowns and quarantine? It was my understanding that they were in fact successful through high testing volume, excellent contact tracing, proper masking up, and targeted lockdowns/quarantine.
  • Florin_Andrei 6y ago
    They have none of the mental blocks the "West" tends to suffer from when it comes to weighing "individual freedom" vs collective action. The West needs to take a long look at itself in the mirror, seeing as some of its fundamental ideas are inadequate when dealing with a blind, pure-numbers threat that only cares about statistics. I'm not saying some of the collectivist excesses seen in some parts of the "East" are okay, but the other extreme turns out to be maladaptive, too.
    • lr4444lr 6y ago
      You know what's funny, when I look back at that old WWII media, America was pushing an awful lot of "civic responsibility" messaging on people. My father, God rest his soul, used to tell me recalling that all young men really were embarrassed about not having a good excuse not to be enlisted. There were the freedom gardens, scrap metal collections, war bonds... This isn't to glorify war or anything, but just to note that there was a time when we did all work toward the greater good.
      • Florin_Andrei 6y ago
        Yes, the pathology of "freedom" is somewhat more recent, at least in terms of its extreme intensity. My gut feeling is that it can be traced back to Ayn Rand & Co, but it's hard to say. But around that time, and near that environment, some spectacularly evil things came to be accepted as "reasonable".
        • meowfly 6y ago
          The science historian and author, Naomi Oreskes has argued that the hyper-individualistic attitude of the 70s-80s was a result of the cold war. The US was so anti-communist that anything that smelled of communism/socialism was denounced.
• jacob2484 6y ago
  Extended, strictly lockdowns do not work as you paralyzing the economy. It's easy to WFH in tech earning a big paycheck to call for lockdowns when you're not impacted by them. Florida and Texas did not have extended lockdowns, and their numbers are not worse that the states that did, and in many cases better. Also, Texas cases went down 3 weeks after mask mandate was lifted. Watch Bill Maher - New Rules from last Friday.
  • NationalPark 6y ago
    I don't think that tracks. Australia, New Zealand, and several countries in east Asia enacted strict lockdown measures and their populations fared better than the US's by basically every metric except a nebulous notion of having the "freedom" to spread an infectious disease. And - this should be obvious but you never know - a massive, uncontrolled pandemic also paralyzes the economy. As for Texas and Florida, I'd love to see some more details on how you're comparing them to other states. It seems like there are a lot of variables you would need to control for (population age and lifestyle, existing healthcare infrastructure, voluntary compliance with guidelines exclusive of legal requirement, etc.). But suffice to say, Florida is in pretty bad shape right now relative to the rest of the U.S., so I'm not sure it makes a good example for your argument.
    • coldcode 6y ago
      Florida did better than 17 countries per deaths, but of course it's only a state. Not much to brag about. None of us here really believe any official state data either. A lot of people come to Florida, stay for a while, and then leave before they get sick, so it is hard to know how bad it was/is. My area had effective mayors who enforced policies, checked businesses, and spent a lot of energy in keeping people safer, and we did much better than many parts of the state where no one cared. Mask use everywhere I go is high which I think is the biggest measure of what works. There are parts of Florida where no one wears a mask or cares to do anything. I always wanted to see per capita cases/deaths per zip code or even voting district, but no one does that.
  • eightysixfour 6y ago
    We need to stop looking at states and start looking at cities when determining success of different mandates. Los Angeles - 234.6 deaths per 100k residents San Francisco - 46.3 deaths per 100k residents Austin - 178.7 deaths per 100k residents San Antonio - 81.5 deaths per 100k residents
• segmondy 6y ago
  Why is this hard to predict? All pandemics begin with a case of one. Just one infected person. If your number is not zero, then it can take off again. There's no stopping it until the virus burns out by infecting everyone and their's herd immunity or vaccinations. You can suppress it with non medical methods such as very strict lockdowns, massive testing, quarantines, mask, social distancing, etc. But it's like an ember, can turn into a fire at any time and burn everything down. Unfortunately, countries do well to suppress it, then relax as if they have conquered it.
• nabla9 6y ago
  Here in Finland there was no super-strict anything and we did well. I think it's more about how well people follow restrictions than how strict the policy is. Even when authorities get some responses wrong, but people follow them, it helps because you can correct them. If you have cynical attitude, that government was wrong on this detail, so everything is now bullshit, nothing will work.
  • AndrewBissell 6y ago
    > I think it's more about how well people follow restrictions than how strict the policy is. I keep hearing this but is there any hard data or studies to back it up? The numbers I've seen comparing e.g. Google Mobility data to case transmission rates haven't shown much correlation at all, let alone causation.
    • nabla9 6y ago
      I suspect that Google mobility data detects strict restrictions, not moderate ones.
• davidgay 6y ago
  Gibraltar seems sadly edifying too: no deaths until November, highest (world-wide) total per-capita deaths at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/gibraltar/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/gibraltar/, but cases are now also basically down to 0 (and https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations has the vaccinated population (not just doses) at above 100%...).
  • smnrchrds 6y ago
    Territories with low populations tend to be at one of the two extremes. Reminds me of how Vatican has always had the lowest murder rate in the world (0 per 100k population), except in 1998 when it became the murder capital of the world (256 per 100k population).
    • sgerenser 6y ago
      Or all the 90s studies about how small (k-12) schools were so much more effective than large ones, and it turned out to just be an artifact of the data. Smaller schools had much more dispersion in outcomes, just as you’d expect. So they had both the best and worst outcomes.
• MengerSponge 6y ago
  The problem is that people think a punishing lockdown is going to be more effective, but it's like any highly technical task: working hard at something is only effective if you are doing the right kind of effort. We (in the West) are big on theater: we've closed public parks, we wear masks outside, and we loooove sanitizing surfaces. Those things are expensive, distracting, and totally ineffective. South Korea and Vietnam don't have super strict lockdowns or quarantines. Instead, they wear masks indoors and have effective contact tracing. FYI, reverse contact tracing is even more effective, because most people aren't highly contagious, which means new cases likely came from a relatively rare super-contagious case. Step backwards to find that person, then contact trace them. Like fire against a grass-type, it's super effective.
  • andrei_says_ 6y ago
    South Korea and Vietnam also have collaborative cultures and non-divisive governments/media trying to cash out on the pandemic.
    • Florin_Andrei 6y ago
      This, right here, is the true differentiating factor.
  • Florin_Andrei 6y ago
    > South Korea and Vietnam don't have super strict lockdowns or quarantines. Instead, they wear masks indoors and have effective contact tracing. > reverse contact tracing is even more effective Yes, but in some cultures that type of measures is seen as running against the idea of "freedom", however they choose to define it. This is the root cause. It's a cultural thing, a set of shared ideas. Turns out, when you're dealing with a nanoscale replicator that only operates on statistics, individuals and their "freedom" are irrelevant. What really matters is how the collective strategy is shaped.
• Tarsul 6y ago
  Complacency. As a German it pains to see me how we went weeks with knowing that the numbers won't get better but not doing anything against it (the same in November or whenever the last time was). There was no strategy behind it (expect maybe the hope that the way-too-slow vaccination program would somehow keep it at bay). There's one thing for sure though: If we still would be fighting the same string as last year then Germany would have very very good numbers. But we are not, we are fighting especially against the Kent variant (with now i think over 90% of cases in Germany accounting for it).
  • Semaphor 6y ago
    we just got federal regulations so weak, the one state doing well had to lower their restrictions for fear of getting sued.
• MomoXenosaga 6y ago
  Dealing with a contagious disease is not rocket science. But in China you get sent to prison for breaking curfew while in the Netherlands you get a €95 fine.
• tim333 6y ago
  >Seems the only countries that keep doing well are the ones with super strict lockdowns and quarantine. Well, with effective measures to control the virus. Places like Taiwan never really locked down - that's more an emergency measure to use after things have run out of control.