I travelled all over Europe past two months and I must say Europe is quite laxed. And there cases haven’t really gone up. Pretty much every outdoor cafes in Europe were open with a few exceptions and I didn’t see much difference other than people wearing masks and social distancing between tables.
I think in US everything is polarized and politicized. To the point that wearing masks is somehow considered against freedom.
I believe health officials have some blames to share. They still have not come clean for their initial mask guidelines that was blatantly wrong. I think health authorities will have long time to regain trusts in US.
I also feel we don’t quite understand the transmission mechanism fully yet. It’s airborne, at least we know that part but the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties also indicate there is some mechanisms in play when indoor.
Europe has twice the population of the United States.
Yet despite this, United States has 4 TIMES the cases per day.
Europe can relax because they worked hard in the beginning to get everything under control. The US never did that, most states (like my home state of Texas) did a half-assed closing for 3 weeks, so the numbers never really got under control.
It's not that clear that a lockdown helps. NY closed the earliest in the US but was the hardest hit nevertheless. It has now mostly reopened and cases aren't going up. Chances are we may have reached herd immunity there.
I have seen recently that serology tests in Italy have shown the same outcome for people who were locked down than essential workers who were not locked down (and mortality stats in the UK told a similar story a couple of months ago).
Also the evolution of deaths in Sweden followed the same shape and timing than all the other european countries who locked down, suggesting the peak had more to do with the natural evolution of the infection than as a result of a lockdown.
And as far as I know, the WHO does not support lockdowns.
I suppose things like how well care homes were protected probably mattered a lot more.
Second or third earliest, and there was early community spread in NY, when CA was locking down and NY was ignoring it for a week or two. And it's home to the densest city. And I think it's uncontroversial that CA lockdowns helped.
>>It's not that clear that a lockdown helps. NY closed the earliest in the US but was the hardest hit nevertheless. It has now mostly reopened and cases aren't going up. Chances are we may have reached herd immunity there.
No, this is absolutely wrong, every single sentence. Lockdowns definitely help. New York was hit hardest because, despite closing the earliest, they still closed way too late. Cuomo resisted calls from his health experts for almost three weeks. By the time he gave the order, there were 5,000 daily cases reported and the virus was practically out of control.
"Majority of New Yorkers were not infected" is not enough to say they don't have herd immunity.
Wasn't there a study showing 40% of people have generic coronavirus anti-bodies from prior colds and it is believed that these help? Though the extent might not be known.
I’ve heard the evidence is mixed for lockdown but I believe most of that evidence is very fuzzy comparing various (poor) degrees of compliance from ok to bad. Didn’t NYC peak almost exactly 2-3 weeks after the lockdown just as would have been expected? And at the extreme of everyone isolated in their apartment 24 hours a day the virus could not really spread.
Thank you !
I am all for the lockdown. I am all for wearing masks. Contact tracing is great and d=should be done more rigorously. I am all for proven methods working well for a disease that is both more and less well-understood than we think.
However, amidst genuinely useful health policy, we also have a seriously large amount of security theater. As of this moment, any stance outside "covid is the next coming of the black death" is met with a lot of pushback.
The disease primarily kills and affects older people. We still haven't seen any age specific policy come out of any govt. Close down old age homes. Ensure social distancing at all costs. Let other things come back to normal slowly. It is near impossible for it to spread via surfaces.
WHO has claimed that truly asymptomatic patients (not pre-symptomatic, not making that distinction initially caused push back) patients rarely transmit, and another study found that about 80% of patients in the 10-30 range are asymptomatic.
From my POV, America failed with Covid due to the South, Republicans and many refusing to take basic covid precautions. Shouting at those who are already doing their bit, for not going above and beyond is not going make this any better. People need to stop with purity tests, and directing their misguided anger towards those who are already doing more than enough. This is knowing what we know from countries that have beaten covid.
> As of this moment, any stance outside "covid is the next coming of the black death" is met with a lot of pushback.
Probably because anything less and everyone thinks they're special enough that special health measures don't apply to them.
Not that I'm ordinarily in favor of dramatizing things, but I'm at a loss about how to handle the lot of regular people that I know personally, who aren't capable of nuance and instead will use any excuse to justify ignoring lockdown & social distancing measures. The pictures coming from Italy in March scared the shit out of everyone, but now that we don't see trucks full of bodies in the news on a regular basis, this significant fraction of the population is back to ignoring all safety measures and whining about "covid craze".
On the contrary, I feel this exact mindset has backfired heavily.
The difference between the 'black death hysteria' and the 'invisibility' of the disease on the ground has only emboldened conspiracy theorists, republicans and idiots.
While Trump certainly made it worse, the medical community is to blame as well.
The death estimates (with or without lockdown) from the highly influential ICL study turned out to be completely bogus. The mixed messaging on masks, ventilators and spread via surfaces were all major missteps. The right wing support of Hydroxychloriquine, the disgraced study opposing it printed by respected medical and journalistic outlets and then its eventual disappearance into obscurity was another major blow to the establishment's credibility.
Breeding resentment among those abiding is never a good idea. Adding even more rules for those who aren't is even worse. The moral and practical choices are almost never the same. If the US had found a middle ground lockdown, that everyone was willing to follow, maybe it would have worked out better.
To be clear, if I was a dictator, the lockdown would have been far more severe. But, the US is the country of freedom, where neither the central or the state govts. have much power to enforce anything. They have to negotiate with the citizens,
Covid cases in the US far exceed those of nations where the lockdown requirements (at least those imposed by NE states) are far less stringent. Clearly, the severity of lockdowns was not the problem. It was the complete inability of the experts to get a vast section of the country onboard.
(It is also possible we are arguing the same thing from different points. In Boston, where I stay, I haven't seen a single person without a mask for weeks, everyone socially distances, we have readily available free testing and I getting a bit annoyed at gyms being closed in all capacities despite the per-capita rate being about as low and everyone doing their due diligence.)
> [WHO] said COVID does not transmit from human to human.
Can you put that canard to rest? On January 14th (when virtually nothing was known about this yet), the WHO tweeted (my highlights):
> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
So, note:
a) this was very early days, and the understanding was in flux.
b) the WHO didn't itself claim anything about the virus and its transmission, but it reported on a study. The WHO doesn't conduct their own studies. The WHO reports and aggregates information from the member states. Here, these were investigation reports from the Chinese authorities, and that's what they said at the time.
c) these were preliminary studies, not a final conclusion.
d) the claim wasn't that there is no transmission, but that at the time no clear evidence for it had been found.
The tweet was maybe ill-advised, and it didn't age well, but it is by no means indicative of corruption.
That is not to say that the WHO doesn't have major problems. But this tweet is not one of them.
Saw the movie clue a couple months ago. It shocked me how bad WHO reputation was back then. 1985.
Professor Plum works for the WHO. —-
Miss Scarlet :
I hardly think it will enhance your reputation at the U.N. Professor Plum, if it's revealed that you have been implicated not only in adultery with one of your patients, but in her death and the deaths of five other people.
Professor Plum : You don't know what kind of people they have at the U.N., I might go up in their estimation.
It varied and we're seeing more cases in the EU coming out of the lockdown. Hell, NZ went for total elimination and they got more cases (possibly due to freight?)
When this is over, I bet the entire planet will have rates similar to Sweden. My theory is lockdowns delay the inevitable. We should protect the most at risk (95% of fatalities in the US are ages 55+), but we also need to realize there is no way to really stop a virus in circulation.
I wrote a while back about how we just need to come to accept our life expectancy is just lower now:
The reason that the "second wave" (if that's what it truly is) is coming now is because of easing of restrictions more than anything else. This is summer, and Europeans religiously go on vacation during summer.
This second rise in Covid-19 is more related to groups moving between borders, and those borders having had their restrictions lifted, than some "lockdowns don't work" conclusion. If you looked at the data for different EU nations, a few weeks after moderate lockdowns were introduced, the curve did in fact flatten and cases began to plummet. And as countries open up their borders -- and gyms have reopened where I live -- cases go up.
I was in Greece a few weeks ago, and the cases in the entire nation were pretty OK. On the island where I was, it was pretty good. But their borders with their neighbors were open -- Croatia, Albania, etc. -- and the uptick came largely from their neighbors. Now, at least last time I checked, current cases are higher than from the "first" wave.
In total - I'd say it's more a result of the vacation mindset and opening of borders here in Europe that is resulting in this summer uptick than a failure of lockdown measures.
More cases in one region that has gone into [alert level 3](https://covid19.govt.nz/covid-19/alert-system/alert-system-o...) and the rest of the country into level 2. With more cases currently being low double digits active cases (almost all of which are in managed isolation) with single digit new active cases per day which is dropping.
New cases were expected, and planned for. There is active investigation into how the virus got into the community, and efforts to improve the resurgence plan. New cases coming from elimination can't really be compared to "we have community spread, but the cases went down so we are going to open up again".
It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine. Look to the 1970s and Swing Flu to see an example of a failed vaccine. It is absolutely insane that anyone is seriously considering we can make a safe vaccine for this in less than a year.
Pharmaceutical companies have never made a successful vaccines for coronaviruses before. I've heard the argument, "Well we have more people working on it." If you hire nine women, you can't make a baby in a month. There is no way, no matter how much money you throw at it, to safely do 5~10 years worth of testing in less than a year.
That was a beautiful strawman, and even one of the replies your comment walked right into it.
There aren't many human coronaviruses circulating to begin with. And they're not dangerous, aside from SARS-CoV-2. Of course there aren't any vaccines for them. Got pretty close on SARS & MERS before they fizzled on their own.
> It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine
How long do you think the leading SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been in development? Years. It's not like they were dreamed up since February.
The SARS vaccine was likely successful. SARS died out and so the vaccine was never fully challenged in a pandemic. But as far as I know antibodies lasted a long time.
How? The whole point of phase 3 clinical trials is long term observation. Have you figured out how to parallelize the passing of time so that it goes by quicker?
A vaccine will be nice to have but it won't be sufficient to eradicate the virus. Some people won't be vaccinated. No vaccine is 100% effective. And there are animal reservoirs; we obviously can't vaccinate wild animals.
We don't get 100% vaccination on any disease, but we have eradicated a few and all but eradicated a bunch. We just need something approximating herd immunity levels. Those who want vaccinations will get them, the rest can slowly add to the total until society as a whole is no longer worried about coronavirus.
If we really get that level of abstention, then maybe it would be a good idea after all to give people who test positive for antibodies some kind of way to prove it.
I don't know but perhaps recent social unrest could have something to do with that?
Europe is getting tired right now, and I'm not talking about economies but about people. You can't lock people for months and expect them to to obey indefinitely. It's unsustainable. It's more reasonable to apply some proportional restrictions than to lock everything down. Eg. limit users of a gym and require disinfection. That's how a legal state should work: effective and proportional restrictions, rest is a human right.
NYC saw substantial social unrest and didn't see any COVID spikes; marches and demonstrations have extended for months and the test positivity rate remains low.
I believe it's the decision not to reopen indoor dining and bars, and to mandate masks, that saved NYC the resurgence that the rest of the country has seen. You absolutely can control COVID even during the current period of social unrest; the US largely chose not to. COVID doesn't seem to like to spread that much during largely masked, outdoor protests. It loves to spread in bars and parties.
School is opening soon, so things will probably get worse, but nevertheless: NYC demonstrates that in an American context, COVID can still be controlled pretty well.
(NYC government has a lot to answer for w/r/t the initial response in March, but that's not the same issue)
Also, the US tests about twice more (per thousand people) vs the rates of testing in Europe, so you should expect at least 2x more cases discovered in the US just by this mere fact.
Most of Europe also has only a "symptoms-based" testing policy, while the US also has an "asymptomic" testing policy.
It's under control from a death perspective. Daily deaths number have been in the 0-20 range for 2+ months in France. The numbers are 100x higher in the US (500-1500/day) over the same period with 5 times the population.
I'm curious about the death rates in the European countries on your WHO link; both France and Spain have clear resurgence in cases but very near zero deaths. Did they actually reduce the morbidity by 100x, or is there some other fundamental difference?
Morbidity has definitely reduced some, both because testing is now covering non-severe cases and because treatment protocols have improved.
But a major factor is that deaths have consistently been a lagging indicator for this disease, both because the progression is quite long and because the most active spreaders tend to be younger and healthier. It's likely that they'll see a matching resurgence in deaths over the next few weeks, as other areas of the world with case surges have consistently seen.
The most vulnerable died and now it's younger, less vulnerable people being infected and we have safety measures to protect the remaining vulnerable populations?
It will be interesting to see the death rate once this is all over. It might be much lower and the initial numbers were skewed by cases in the elderly.
I wonder how well people would respond to another lockdown. As you can see here in the US people are not taking it well. It also appears that Covid cases are spiking in Spain and Germany as well as France.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
ok? Nothing I said was wrong. I never said "EU", and I never said "EU includes Russia", and I never said "Europe doesnt include Russia".
So what is your point? Just throwing out random facts? And even if you just talk about EU, its still embarassing. EU still has 35% higher population than the US, while the US has 4 times the daily cases.
Higher. US positive rate is 6.9%, Europe is mostly quite a bit lower (Austria 2.5%, Belgium 3%, France 2.4%, Germany 0.9%, Italy 1.9%, Scandinavia <1% except Sweden 3.5%, UK 0.7%) except Spain (7.2%) and Croatia (10.3%).
Most places in Europe locked down early and harder than the US. We got damn close to elimination in many areas. This meant that many countries have been able to broadly reopen their economies. Sadly not every country played ball and it is spreading again.
Poland took some early actions but there are no covid free areas. Infections rates have plateaued but remain on a more or less constant levels. And people are getting upset. It will be really hard to keep them homes during the second wave... Same seems to be true for Czech Ostrava region.
Norway. I agree another strict lockdown will be difficult to enforce. We are looking at a second wave more like the US's ongoing first wave. BUT treatment is seriously improved since March. The IFR is now lower. So that lockdown will still have saved many lives even if the second wave saturates the population.
> They still have not come clean for their initial mask guidelines that was blatantly wrong.
I'm not sure I follow here - what is missing on that front? They have explained why the mask recommendation changed and how they got to their initial recommendation. Not sure how much more they could do there.
What was the explanation again? The only one I've heard is that they lied to us so that medical first responders would have masks available. Which seems strange and unforgivable if true, seeing as how a simple piece of cotton fabric easily made at home (not fleece, as we've learned) would still have been a massive improvement over nothing at all.
> the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties also indicate there is some mechanisms in play when indoor
One know mechanic is the virus's half life when airborne. We know that the airborne virus can be killed/filtered when there is enough UV light and/or a fine enough particulate air filter in place. In other words, indoor safety can be improved with better filters. Without the proper filtration, HVAC circulation can help circulate the virus, which could be the problem in nursing homes and at parties.
Meanwhile, outdoor air is relatively safe when there is enough distancing as sunlight will take the virus's half life down to 90 seconds at 20% humidity and 70-75 degrees [1]. 20% humidity is pretty low, but the good news is that half life gets even shorter as humidity goes up. Sunlight doesn't even contain the best frequency of UV light to kill the virus, but it's intense enough that it still works fairly well.
Oh really? Croatia couldn't afford to lose the tourist season. As a result the number of cases is skyrocketing. The daily reported cases are much worse now then were at the time of the first lockdown. (see koronavirus.hr for the graph).
That is true. One cannot completely relax. The point is that Asia and Europe has by and large managed, after the big initial outbreaks, to keep R in check with moderate, yet consistent measures (social distancing, no large events, masks).
When people get careless, it flares up, but can (thanks to decent testing meanwhile) typically be suppressed again with regional lockdowns before it gets really bad.
The initial mask guidance was pretty clearly wrong, and there was plenty of griping at the time that they were trying to conserve supplies for front line workers (and rightly so) by spreading FUD. Huge numbers of people were wearing masks back then, against the guidance, because it was pretty obviously better than not wearing one.
In my "bubble" the experts have been proven right, time and again. Again, the mask thing is about the only piece of bad information I can remember being spread.
And yet, all over the internet, 6+ months into this, we have a bunch of people who deliberately misinformed themselves for months, complaining that "the experts have been wrong over and over again".
> It’s airborne, at least we know that part but the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties also indicate there is some mechanisms in play when indoor.
No, the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties indicate that airborne transmission is a lot easier when you have high risk people who can't avoid close contact with others, or a lot of people in close contact in a small space, in a closed environment where air is recirculated.
> They still have not come clean for their initial mask guidelines that was blatantly wrong
I don't think they were. There is a 2013 study that shows cloth masks would be ineffective at preventing spread of respiratory illnesses, and posts by UIC Health early on that said they weren't necessary (which they've added a notice to). I wrote about this here:
Fauci originally said masks were not very useful (quite convincingly I might add) and then turned around and said they were. When pressed, he said he was afraid of health professionals running out of PPE. He admitted he made a noble lie. So if he was lying then ... how do we know he's not lying now? How do we know he's not pushing masks because it's causing political strife and fear? After all, his wife has a major role at the NIH for approving emergency drugs and vaccines, and Fauci has vested interested in big pharma. You cannot trust a liar and he admitted to lying directly to us!
In Canada, a man was pepper sprayed at a Tim Horton by a cop for not wearing a mask. Another man refused to wear one, went home, and the cops came to his house. The resulting altercation lead to the cops fatally shooting him. A woman with a medical notice in Melbourne was choked by cops and arrested (granted she did flip them off instead of handing them her note like she should have).
Masks have really torn everyone apart, and have been used as a big source of shame. By mandating them, you break the social contract, and you're asking people to accept certain beliefs, for which there are 10+ scientific papers published on both sides of the fence. They make it harder for us to "see" one another. The hurt our trust because we evolved to depend on facial expressions. And if they don't do very much as far as preventing spread of infection, than they might even cause more harm than good. Am I the only one who sees the normalization of the mask as contributing to those who are rioting?
There are plenty of nations and States within the US without mask mandates and we see similar infection rates based on population density. In the end, I think they'll end up being a political statement. Nothing more, and everything less.
In your writing, you say:
"A study publish in 2013 by the journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness found that cloth masks wouldn’t be effective during an outbreak of a respiratory infection"
However, the study you referenced states the opposite:
"Both masks significantly reduced the number of microorganisms expelled by volunteers, although the
surgical mask was 3 times more effective in blocking transmission than the homemade mask." AND "Conclusion: Our findings suggest that a homemade mask should only be considered as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals, but it would be better than no protection."
"However, these masks would provide the wearers little protection from microorganisms from others persons who are infected with respiratory diseases. As a result, we would not recommend the use of homemade face masks as a method of reducing transmission of infection from aerosols."
No. No, no no. Masks have torn nobody apart. They could have brought us together. One segment of the population embraced politics and decided that masks was the last straw among all of the rules they otherwise accept in their lives, and decided to turn it into a public statement. These people are the ones that have torn everyone apart and ripped up the social contract.
The rest of us are just quietly sucking it up and doing what little we can to improve outcomes for all of society.
> One segment of the population embraced politics and decided that masks was the last straw among all of the rules they otherwise accept in their lives, and decided to turn it into a public statement.
Let's not pretend that there isn't a "wear masks because of politics" segment in the US, too. It's been turned into signalling on both sides, to the detriment of us all.
Why would you wear a mask solely because of politics? It's a good thing to do that has no downsides and it might help other people. It might even help you. Worst case it was a little inconvenience.
In nearly all countries, people simply wear masks when appropriate. The common fight against the virus brings people together, if anything.
To watch the self-destruction of the USA about the "great mask debate" is somewhat baffling.
> There are plenty of nations and States within the US without mask mandates
You need to look at mask wearing, not mask mandates (believe it or not, there are people who wear masks voluntarily); and correct for a whole lot of factors, such as density (compare Hong Kong and Alaska). Then, from what I gather, evidence supports masks.
I think in US everything is polarized and politicized. To the point that wearing masks is somehow considered against freedom. I believe health officials have some blames to share. They still have not come clean for their initial mask guidelines that was blatantly wrong. I think health authorities will have long time to regain trusts in US.
I also feel we don’t quite understand the transmission mechanism fully yet. It’s airborne, at least we know that part but the clusters in nursing homes and indoor parties also indicate there is some mechanisms in play when indoor.