181–190 of 568 posts
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Sweden has one of the highest deaths/million.
Yup, it's worse than the United States even. They're not a model of success at all.
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> other countries haven't locked down hard and aren't seeing a big spread Let’s be precise. Some other countries haven’t locked down hard and aren’t seeing a big spread yet . You mentioned Sweden. Here was Time a few days ago: > A head doctor at a major hospital in Sweden says the current approach will “probably end in a historical massacre.” He says healthcare workers at his hospital who have tested positive for the…
On a per capita basis sweden isn't really more worse off than many other countries that have shutdown. It's about middle of the pack. Personal responsibility lets us have our cake and eat it too. http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Personally I would call this “government irresponsibility”, but I guess we’ll find how it turns out within a few more weeks.
I’m not sure “have our cake and eat it to” is a good way to describe a crisis that is killing a whole lot of people and smashing the economy (in Sweden and many other places).
How many businesses are not going to recover at all after this is all over?
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> As I see it, there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken. California has been spared because it's not in the Covid Belt. That's a term I've come up with to describe the ideal climate that SARS-CoV-2 thrives in. All hard hit regions exist in the Covid climate belt. Not all the least hit areas (eg South Korea) exist outside of the Covid Belt. You can also limit its spread with ot…
Do you have any sources? Epidemiologists don't think that temperature has been playing a major role here, so do you have any sources that's not just you hypothesizing this? Because one trend I see a lot on HN is people making wild guesses about things waaaaaaay outside their area of expertise ...
I've been talking about this on HN for a while now. I've been making the same case over and over.
Guess what hasn't changed since I first floated it here? The higher temp areas I've been touting under this theory have continued to be spared compared to the Covid Belt climate areas, despite predictions by the so-called experts that everyone would be hit (the same experts that are so baffled by Texas and California). It's not testing or luck or lockdown measures or tracing. Texas did everything wrong compared to eg South Korea, they should look like New York / New Jersey / Michigan / Massachussets. It's the climate providing a big assist.
I've seen some really outlandish articles dancing around it. What crazy magic is this, that is protecting these states?!?
It's the climate.
Epidemiologists don't think so? Which ones? It's a proven fact that coronaviruses and influenza are both impeded by higher temperatures. What I'm describing makes perfect sense. We already know there is a direct correlation between higher temps and lower viability of such respiratory viruses.
From 2011 & SARS: "The Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity on the Viability of the SARS Coronavirus"
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/av/2011/734690/
MIT recent observation with SARS-CoV-2: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/19/905217/coronavir...
March from China: "High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19"
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>Are you being facetious with the fake news reference? Not really. Broadcast news is ad-supported too--hence the decline in quality. You either have subscriptions--ad-supported, or taxpayer supported--as has been historically the case in the UK. So, yes, if ads don't work, either only the wealthier get access to higher quality news, people use libraries (good luck with that), or the government funds (which has its ow…
Ok, I understand your reasoning. The use of the specific term "fake news" rubbed me the wrong way. That term is linked with malicious propaganda so your initial comment called to mind dystopian ideas of having an underclass that the rest of society agrees to keep in their place through lies and deceit. There are other options beyond just ad supported and tax payer supported. You can make news reporting a requirement…
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And at least in Michigan, they're not taking the time to open up low risk businesses now - instead they're filling in even more of the gaps that allowed life to continue. No golf courses, even without any staff contact. No landscaping. No landscaping supplies . No motorboats or jet skis. No travel between two residences you own. But at least you can still buy lottery tickets!
Some of these can be explained at least. Landscaping is very non-essential, and it's hard to maintain social distancing while doing it because the way the crews operate is it's a bunch of guys riding together in one truck between each job sites (it's not a caravan of different vehicles, one per vehicle). Additionally, my mom has been complaining about the landscapers where she lives and is angry that they're still al…
As for bodies piling up in Detroit... While that's true, additional restrictions added today won't have any impact there. Either the previous restrictions were sufficient, in which case Detroit should be peaking soon, or they weren't sufficient and there'll be several times that number of bodies before these restrictions start to have an effect.
My personal view is that low-risk activities should be allowed whenever possible to maximize the time period that people will willingly endure these restrictions. It looks like this won't be a sprint but a marathon, and people's willingness to comply is extremely relevant there.
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Yes. Contrast Sweden and the US to Australia and South Korea. Australia and South Korea are doing much better. The Australian and South Korean response has been competent.
Australia has a mandatory stay-at-home order, and they issued it earlier in their outbreak than we did in theirs. That explains why they're doing so well. In South Korea they all gravitated to masks very early, and they developed enough testing capacity early on to allow contact tracing to remain viable (so far).
Australia is spared for the same reason most of Latin America, most of Africa and hotter climates in Asia have been.
Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand don't have such low death rates because they've been running testing at the rate of Germany and doing tracing & lockdown & testing & quarantine as well as South Korea. It's the hotter climates. It's hot in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney during the Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, ie during the outbreak so far. Melbourne has been shielded for the same reason Lagos Nigeria has been.
Australia's measures are without question further helping to limit cases. Having a warmer climate during the outbreak time while simultaneously implementing aggressive measures, is the ideal double whammy to get a good outcome. The climate makes it dramatically easier.
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> other countries haven't locked down hard and aren't seeing a big spread Let’s be precise. Some other countries haven’t locked down hard and aren’t seeing a big spread yet . You mentioned Sweden. Here was Time a few days ago: > A head doctor at a major hospital in Sweden says the current approach will “probably end in a historical massacre.” He says healthcare workers at his hospital who have tested positive for the…
The good thing is we’ll see in the end. Lots of predictions. It’s almost as if you can’t be criticized for being too cautious. Sure, but the good will won’t last forever. The US accepts 22k deaths a year without blinking due to flu. That’s just the flu. What’s the magic number we’re willing to accept? 50k? 100? There has to be a percentage of the population we are willing to accept as casualty because we already do,…
The US spends a lot of effort trying to convince people to get flu shots, take antivirals if they get sick, and stay away from vulnerable populations while contagious; hospitals prepare extensively for increased use during flu season (and medical workers are vaccinated, making flu much less personally risky for them), widely distribute easy-to-administer flu tests, treat people and keep them alive as best they can, etc. Estimated flu death numbers are also not comparable to current reported Covid death numbers, because they include a ton of guesswork, since many of the people who die while infected with flu officially succumb to some other condition (according to death certificates).
We don’t go into total economic lockdown for 2 months per year, because it would be impossible to enforce and extremely expensive, but we sure did during the last comparable pandemic, the 1918 flu.
Currently (and this will hopefully change as medical knowledge improves), Covid seems to be more than 10x more deadly than seasonal flu for most demographic groups. In an unchecked Covid epidemic (with hospitals overwhelmed) it appears that on the order of 1% of the population dies. (This has happened in some towns in Italy, where a very high percentage of the population was likely infected.)
> lockdown will ultimately spread misery
Having 1% of the entire population die within a matter of months is going to cause an extremely severe economic shock with or without official actions.
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That's the joke!
It's not funny, it's just tired and repetitious, and HN discourages joking around anyway because it leads to low quality conversations and contests over who can be funnier instead of who can contribute the most meaningfully to a conversation.
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Do you have any sources? Epidemiologists don't think that temperature has been playing a major role here, so do you have any sources that's not just you hypothesizing this? Because one trend I see a lot on HN is people making wild guesses about things waaaaaaay outside their area of expertise ...
By wild guess you mean ignoring the comically epic pile of overwhelming evidence that shows climate is a very large factor in impeding the spread of the virus (and applies to locations regardless of testing rates or economic condition)? I've been talking about this on HN for a while now. I've been making the same case over and over. Guess what hasn't changed since I first floated it here? The higher temp areas I've b…
I would want to see a very careful treatment of this data before I could be convinced that temperature is a greater factor in transmission rates than stay-at-home policies or population density. It would be really easy to cherry-pick examples.
A couple of counter-examples that come immediately to mind are Chicago and Florida. Chicago's climate should fit your model but they have about 1/3rd the cases per capita vs New York City. Florida meanwhile should be warm enough to be outside of your "Covid Belt", but cases there are expanding extremely rapidly and it's likely to overtake Washington state in per capita cases and deaths. Louisiana similarly has one of the highest per capita death rates in the nation.
Climate might be one factor, but it's not clear that it's a big factor, let alone the most important one.