As I keep saying, comparing to "Europe" is almost meaningless because of the diversity of governments and cultures. It may also be unreasonable to talk of the US as a whole in this case.
Infections are inherently locally clustered. There seem to be all sorts of factors affecting spread, and there's no clear picture of what they are. Eastern Europe isn't very heavily affected and nobody seems to know why. Belgium is a disaster; why?
The UK made a number of big mistakes; the first cases were appearing at the end of February, but the Cheltenham Festival still went ahead in mid-March putting 250,000 people close to each other. We're now relaxing the lockdown and putting people back on packed public transport despite still having thousands of new cases per day.
In a month's time, the best handling countries will be almost entirely out of lockdown with weekly COVID deaths below 10. The worst handling countries will still have lockdown and weekly deaths in the hundreds. It looks like that will include the UK and New York state.
Genuine question: how will these countries keep deaths below 10 a week while being completely out of lockdown? Doesn't that rely on a treatment or vaccine?
1) Stop infected people from entering the country. If you have enough testing capacity, you can allow in those who are clear. Otherwise they have to be quarantined.
2) Track every infection within the country.
3) Test all their contacts.
Of course, those are very hard to do in an airtight fashion. But the smaller the absolute numbers the easier they are to do. Countries not working towards building this capability are just going to keep struggling.
Infections are inherently locally clustered. There seem to be all sorts of factors affecting spread, and there's no clear picture of what they are. Eastern Europe isn't very heavily affected and nobody seems to know why. Belgium is a disaster; why?
The UK made a number of big mistakes; the first cases were appearing at the end of February, but the Cheltenham Festival still went ahead in mid-March putting 250,000 people close to each other. We're now relaxing the lockdown and putting people back on packed public transport despite still having thousands of new cases per day.
In a month's time, the best handling countries will be almost entirely out of lockdown with weekly COVID deaths below 10. The worst handling countries will still have lockdown and weekly deaths in the hundreds. It looks like that will include the UK and New York state.