I agree that there’s a lot we don’t know and that, to some extent, “luck” (or whatever you want to call it) is a factor. The virus reached certain cities and metro areas before others. Once that happened, its spread probably had to a lot with population density, the mobility of the population, and many other factors.
But countries that took steps to screen travelers, implement testing and tracing early, and shut things down early generally fared well, and those that didn’t, didn’t.
I have never heard that the order was for any patient with a known current contagious infection to be forced onto a nursing home. Only that recovered patients leaving hospitals were not to be refused admission or readmission. Is there any factual evidence that any of these patients were responsible for any subsequent infections?
Given the numbers of deaths in NY versus the rest of the populace, the NY nursing home deaths look pretty much normal as a proportion of the population.
“no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to a nursing home solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19."
Also, from this ABC News article, it sounds like the order was followed and aick patients WERE sent into nursing homes:
Cuomo also said that since nursing homes were private, the state had no obligation to provide PPE to them, while they were sorely lacking. New York also delayed testing in nursing homes, whereas Florida and other states set up crash programs to test and handle nursing home patients using the National Guard.
It comes down to how you define a city. When two cities, or a large city and it surrounds merge it gets weird. My point was to point out that claiming special dispensations for large cities isn’t reasonable. We can quickly find a point in the list of US cities where all remaining cities are smaller than the main 5 Australian cities. In the context of discussing Sweden they will have a very hard time justifying things based upon city populations in comparison.
What is different about Sweden? They didn’t lock down.
As of last week, they had the highest per capita death rate of any country in the world.
Sweden has roughly the same land mass as California with 1/4 of the population. 40% of its workers already telecommute. They have a very high population of people who live by themselves. They are a demographically young society. Their culture is similar to their neighbors, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Most of those factors would give them an advantage over the coronavirus.
Is there any website that does daily or weekly stats for countries where you can sort according to pandemic management measures? At the very least I would like to see all countries arrayed on a string with harsh early lock-down at one end [New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam etc] and bugger-all or deferred measures [USA USA, Brazil and so on] towards the other. Ideally being able to sort by other measures as well - social support net to prevent people being forced to work when sick, testing regime etc would be very useful as well.
I suspect - no I’'ll go stronger - I predict, that population density as discussed above will prove to be fairly irrelevant, compared to rapidity of lock-down, the degree of mass testing and contact tracing , political determination in minimising fatalities, and probably in eventual effective opening up.
Japan has a history of mask wearing, along with general hygiene awareness. They also conducted contact tracing very early, have a homogeneous population, have built-in cultural distancing including not shaking hands.
Sweden did none of these things except some voluntary social distancing, disallowing crowds larger than 50 people and canceling secondary education.
This is an article from about a month ago. (I didn’t post it because it’s paywalled. But this part sticks with me.) The Swedes hired some Chinese people to help them with the coronavirus. The cultural clash between the Chinese researchers and the Swedes was stark in terms of mask wearing and PPE.
I wish I could see the rest. But this part paints an ironic picture.
Why is no one asking why India, Pakistan, Burma, India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and every other country in that region has done so well? Is it possible they have less obese people, maybe their elder and sick stay at home with the families? Do they have a far less people hanging on as they near the end of their lives? Just maybe they would have all done fairly well without lock downs. It kind of looks like over 5 billion of the worlds population is doing very well with this virus.
And here’s a working paper (pdf) discussing the findings so far. The only thing they really show is that governments adopted stricter policies as death counts rose. It’s nice to have it shown in data, I guess, but doesn’t look at the effectiveness of individual measures with respect to fighting COVID-19. Hopefully other researchers will use this data in conjunction with infection/death statistics and be able to tease out the effects of various policies. I’d guess it will be weeks, months, or more likely years before we can conclusively say what the appropriate response was.
You’ve got India twice on this list. And no, it’s not “doing well”. They locked down hard (and maybe too quickly) when cases starting skyrocketing. There’s also a question about the statistics. They only count deaths in verified cases. When somebody dies, they didn’t bother testing them and they weren’t added to the statistics.
If you are trying to make a case that maybe countries can do well without lockdowns, you picked some odd examples. Most of these examples did lock down, albeit to varying degrees, and most still had severe outbreaks even so. I mean, sure, they’re mostly doing fine compared to the US, but that’s an incredibly low bar to clear.
I don’t think certain countries like the U.S. and Western Europe will do well under any circumstances. I think the lockdowns will slow things down but do far more damage in the long haul.
@Great Antibob
Restricted travel at the beginning of April is a late start, isn’t it? Cambodia closed cinemas and clubs mid-March, basically the same as here in Ontario. NYC closed down bars and cinemas by March 17 and the state issued “shelter at home” on March 20th.
Are you saying Cambodia is an example of a quick mover in the lockdown?
The same Indonesia suspected of undercounting cases and deaths?
And that still doesn’t account for India and Vietnam. Both locked down hard but at different times. India is known to have undercounted due to logistical difficulties. Vietnam did ok but acted earlier.
Not at all.
But I am saying it’s not a great example if the argument one wants to make is that countries that don’t lock down seem to have the same or not terribly worse statistics than countries that do. It didn’t stay open, so how can one draw that particular conclusion using Cambodia as a data point vs neighbor countries?
My point is that for some reason the numbers in that region are so vastly different than numbers in the western world that I don’t think any kind of comparisons are valid or useful.
Brazil on Track to Be Most Obese in World. I was a bit puzzled as to why Brazil was fairing so badly in the pandemic. Article after article on how Brazil is dethroning the U.S. as the most Obese country in the world. Why is the media not doing more to highlight the dangers of obesity in this pandemic?