Pretty much on a daily basis the news here in the US has brought us stories of groups of people doing pretty much the exact opposite of what public health officials recommend in order to avoid being infected with (or transmitting) the coronavirus. There have been fistfights and murders over mask-wearing, gigantic pool/lake parties, businesses remaining open despite executive orders against it, megachurches holding mass, and now this fall, college students gathering in huge groups to engage in ill-advised bacchanalian shenanigans.
What’s been happening in other countries? ISTR some large church events in South Korea early in the panemic, but has that sort of thing been ongoing in the months since, or was that a rare exception? What about Europe, Japan, Australia, and other places?
The UK has them as well and there have been several pictures of beach goers totally ignoring distancing and mask recommendations.
Spain is seeing a large (by non-US standards) recent outbreak for similar reasons.
Too many articles to cite, but there have been anti-lockdown protests across Europe, Australia, and even in New Zealand. Many have been linked to right-wing extremists like QAnon.
I’d say that Brazil is outdoing the US in sheer incompetence of its leadership, I’d guess that their national death rate will far exceed US - it has not slowed down at all.
I live is South Florida; a major US hotspot although now declining a bit. I have many Brazilian neighbors who have family back in Brazil. These are fairly successful smart people.
They tell me their family members still down there are terrified of how the disease is running rampant while the government is doing all it can to make the situation worse.
We often ask each other: “So, who’s the bigger idiot, your President or mine?”. Always worth a rueful headshake. How did humanity get itself to such a pass?
I have to imagine that Duterte in the Philippines is on a similar course to disaster.
Not the case. For all his faults, he has cracked down very hard over there. The restrictions are extremely severe in the Philippines and their numbers aren’t even in the top 20 globally.
Schools are about to open, right? Did Khan just kinda throw up his hands a while back, to the effect of ‘we can’t keep this lockdown going or it will kill us’?
Still and all, hasn’t the country been relatively spared?
Yes, on the 15th, but a final decision will be made in Monday. Scuttlebutt is that older kids start first and younger later.
He did say that a full lockdown could not be maintained, but since June they have shifted focus to targeted lockdowns of identified hotspots. They only permitted restaurants to reopen two weeks ago, there still is a blanket ban on large gatherings such a sports events, concerts, political rallies.
Yes. We are smack in the middle of two major hotspots, Iran and India.
I have a friend in Cebu City, Philippines. From what I’ve seen of her life there, they put the US to shame. All summer long, knowing her kids (1st and 3rd graders) would likely be required to mask for school, she had the entire family mask from after breakfast to 3 pm every day. She made a game out of it and ramped the time up gradually. Meanwhile, people in the US just bitched and moaned about masks.
Around a week ago it was announced that the schools would not reopen, relying on distant learning instead. They remodeled a room in their home to be a classroom, with two computers. She began right away structuring each day around learning. They’d been doing workbooks all summer, then seamlessly transitioned over to computers. Her kids are two of the happiest children you’ll ever meet.
Meanwhile, in the US, people are clamoring to reopen schools, which I’ll bet are re-closed within a month or two,
Yeah, the schools reopening has been a cluster. There seems to be no standard model and every school has to sort it out for themselves, with predictable results.
The colleges are on point to prove how bad it can be, with students welcomed back on campus and into dorms where they go ahead and infect each other, cases spike, then the school switches over to distance learning and sends all the infected kids back home to spread disease in their home communities - all within a matter of days. SMH. I imagine the results are the same anywhere in the world right about now. Schools initially opening with in-person learning will be switching to online learning like dominoes - I will be surprised if any college ends this first semester the same way they started (unless they started with distance learning).
College professor here (at a small, no-name state college in the South). I think it’s important to remember that you aren’t going to hear about the colleges where things are going OK, because that is not news. In our case, classes have been in session for three weeks with the first students moving in nearly a month ago. We had a small flurry of cases early on that resulted in a couple of sports teams being quarantined and the junior-year cohort in the nursing school switching to distance learning for two weeks, and then … nothing much. Two new cases among students in the last week, one of them a distance-learning student who wasn’t on campus anyway, no cases so far in faculty and staff, no evidence so far of onward transmission on campus. We had “de-densified” pretty heavily over the summer, switching a lot of big lecture classes to online in the hope that it would enable us to keep upper-level seminars and lab / practicum classes face to face, and so far, it seems to be working out. I expect this is the story of a lot of schools across the country, it’s just not the stuff that makes for dramatic headlines.
It’s also worth noting that most colleges with outbreaks are NOT shutting the campus down, switching to distance learning for the rest of the semester, and sending students home – there has been a whole variety of approaches, ranging from quarantining students who have tested positive and their close contacts but otherwise carrying on with business as usual, to switching to online for a few weeks but encouraging students to stay put, to putting the whole campus on lockdown (Gettysburg College in PA).
My sister has been told that she and her colleagues should consider teaching online, from their offices. She counter-offered with an invitation for the Universities Administration to engage in self intercourse and has decamped 300 miles to our parent’s house for two weeks starting Sunday.
Australia has generally pretty low numbers. All of the recent outbreaks on Australia have been associated with people doing the exact opposite of what public health officials recommend.
Going to work when sick. Going to illegal parties. Traveling illegally from restricted areas to unrestricted areas. Breaking lockdown rules in hospitals. Breaking lockdown rules in quarantine. Breaking lockdown rules in aged care. Etc, whatever. Then somebody goes to a bar, or a big family gathering, and suddenly its blown up into an outbreak.
We haven’t had much of a problem with organizations or huge groups. The outbreaks have come from individuals, and then spread because the disease is infectious.