3 ms·

There's little that can be done, sadly. We had so many shutdowns/lockdowns that did not really help (here in Germany, lockdowns were usually announced when the

There's little that can be done, sadly. We had so many shutdowns/lockdowns that did not really help (here in Germany, lockdowns were usually announced when the growth rate had already leveled off). Closing schools and kindergarten hurts kids. Home office might be an idea, where it is not already standard. What I wonder is: Instead of only restricting movement in the general population, why are there not many more tests? Why can we not PCR test the whole population every single day? Using a relatively straightforward pooling scheme that should not be too difficult, should it? At the same time: Why on earth is it so difficult to coordinate vaccination? Why is no industrialized nation capable of vaccinating 10-20% of its population on a given day? I really feel like government response has been disproportionate so far: Many restrictions and few, if any, actual actions.

basisword 5y ago
In the UK we can order boxes of lateral flow tests for free online. You can easily test daily before going out with friends/going to work etc. but for some reason, despite the ease of this most people still don’t bother. Obviously governments can do better but we have free daily testing, vaccines available for almost every one, and still laziness/stupidity win in too many cases.
uniqueuid 5y ago
Regarding tests: It's still problematic that self-administered antigene tests have weak sensitivity (so even if you test every day the tests will miss many cases). PCR tests cost something around 100€ a piece, so assuming Germany has ~90 million population, that's 9 billion Euros for a single cross-sectional population test. Now let's add some speculative factors: Some 10 million (+/- 10 million) are strongly opposed to state-mandated measures. Some will evade the tests, some will fake them, some may become violent. These people are also among those who are most likely to be Cov-positive. Also, testing the entire population would only help if you simultaneously lock down the borders to prevent re-import. So while broad testing has its merits, I feel like the gains here would be mostly modest.
dpark 5y ago
> Why is no industrialized nation capable of vaccinating 10-20% of its population on a given day? Probably because there aren’t enough qualified people to do the work. It takes a lot of people to manage a mass vaccination. Even just crowd control at a mass vaccination site requires quite a few people. It’s not clear that capacity to vaccinate is a significant factor in industrialized nations at this point, anyway. Vaccine uptake had halted due to “hesitancy”, not capacity.

basisword 5y ago

In the UK we can order boxes of lateral flow tests for free online. You can easily test daily before going out with friends/going to work etc. but for some reason, despite the ease of this most people still don’t bother. Obviously governments can do better but we have free daily testing, vaccines available for almost every one, and still laziness/stupidity win in too many cases.

uniqueuid 5y ago

Regarding tests: It's still problematic that self-administered antigene tests have weak sensitivity (so even if you test every day the tests will miss many cases). PCR tests cost something around 100€ a piece, so assuming Germany has ~90 million population, that's 9 billion Euros for a single cross-sectional population test. Now let's add some speculative factors: Some 10 million (+/- 10 million) are strongly opposed to state-mandated measures. Some will evade the tests, some will fake them, some may become violent. These people are also among those who are most likely to be Cov-positive. Also, testing the entire population would only help if you simultaneously lock down the borders to prevent re-import. So while broad testing has its merits, I feel like the gains here would be mostly modest.

dpark 5y ago

> Why is no industrialized nation capable of vaccinating 10-20% of its population on a given day? Probably because there aren’t enough qualified people to do the work. It takes a lot of people to manage a mass vaccination. Even just crowd control at a mass vaccination site requires quite a few people. It’s not clear that capacity to vaccinate is a significant factor in industrialized nations at this point, anyway. Vaccine uptake had halted due to “hesitancy”, not capacity.