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The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

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Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#51

Post by gridspy »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #38
threeseed wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockdowns work. End of story. Melbourne, Australia had a 4-month lockdown which turned an exponentially-rising 500+ cases a day scenario into elimination. Saving thousands of lives. No other place has managed to do something similar and it shows hotel quarantine of foreign arrivals, aggressive contact-tracing, mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing and lockdowns work. The Swedish laissez-faire approach does not.

New Zealand did the same.

Yes, but here in NZ we didn't wait until there were 500 infections to act. The lockdown was instituted around the time of <100 active infections being detected and our level 4 lockdown is far more stringent than any US state lockdown.

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#52

Post by [deleted] »

baxtr wrote: post #27
jensgrud wrote: post #17

Definitely a report we did not want to hear. Just the the record though, the author is factually wrong about Denmark being one of the jurisdictions that "chose not to stamp out this virus and blithely tolerated high infection rates" and is probably referring to Sweden - see https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/the-nor... . We actually wiped out an entire industry of mink farming in the name of stoppin…

He is also factually wrong on at least one other thing: “He finds it astonishing that COVID-19 has boosted its infectiousness by 30 to 50 per cent over previous strains by doing what viruses do: evolve, mutate and adapt for more effective reproduction.” The UK strain seems to be 25% more infectious. It’s still bad but less than mentioned. EDIT: source is the latest Drosten podcast, where he referenced to some new evi…

[deleted]

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#53

Post by Shacklz »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #21
jensgrud wrote: post #17

Definitely a report we did not want to hear. Just the the record though, the author is factually wrong about Denmark being one of the jurisdictions that "chose not to stamp out this virus and blithely tolerated high infection rates" and is probably referring to Sweden - see https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/the-nor... . We actually wiped out an entire industry of mink farming in the name of stoppin…

Yeah I think the mink culling was an absurd over-reaction and highly unethical. Those poor minks. (Disclosure: I also think the same for the human lockdowns too though)

That the mink industry still existed in this day and age in a country such as Denmark was in my opinion a complete travesty to begin with. Having all these animals in ridiculously small cages just for the sake of their fur - the cruelty is appalling.

As cruel as Corona itself is - it did bring a few good things, killing the Mink industry was definitely one of them in my opinion.

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#54

Post by gridspy »

baxtr wrote: post #44
threeseed wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK is an island and is the worst country in the world per-capita. Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.

Yes, agreed. It’s embarrassing for the UK... my point was that there is no example of a western, liberal country not being an island that was able to reach zero Covid. It’s just way easier as an island state.

New Zealand is about as large as Europe. Larger than the UK.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-n...

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#55

Post by strogonoff »

zpeti wrote: post #12

China and Vietnam get the virus under control by using centralised quarantines. I wonder how many people supporting the sentiments of this article would be ok with someone arriving at their doorstep, taking you to a prison basically whether you agree or not, and quaranteening you there for at least 10 days with other covid people. Perhaps they also take your family too, in case they are also infected. Are you willing…

I find the notion of China having the virus under control hard to believe.

CCP is known to misinform with less at stake than this, and to not care all that much about large areas of rural territory (recall the one child policy, which was more or less unenforced outside of larger cities and resulted in the depressing phenomenon of millions of “invisible” children who are outside of the system and do not have access to education or healthcare). With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the virus has been raging over the countryside, unreported.

That is not to say I know one way or the other, but merely to point out that relying on official information may not be correct—one ought to look at secondary signs, such as new hospitals being built or some inconsistencies in numbers. Claiming that centralized measures helped get the virus under control based on official numbers from a totalitarian regime may be disingenuous.

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#56

Post by polote »

threeseed wrote: post #28
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think the mink culling was an absurd over-reaction and highly unethical. Those poor minks. (Disclosure: I also think the same for the human lockdowns too though)

Lockdowns work. End of story. Melbourne, Australia had a 4-month lockdown which turned an exponentially-rising 500+ cases a day scenario into elimination. Saving thousands of lives. No other place has managed to do something similar and it shows hotel quarantine of foreign arrivals, aggressive contact-tracing, mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing and lockdowns work. The Swedish laissez-faire approach does not.

> Lockdowns work. End of story

This is not true. Hard lockdown that people follow seems to work. But lowdown only doesn't work.

1. Not all lockdown are equal, look at Germany how long they have a been in a soft lockdown so that death can decrease? like 2 months? Not sure at this point this is due to lockdown

2. If people don't follow the order it doesn't work, Peru one of the toughest and longest lockdown but yet also the highest mortality in the world

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#57

Post by threeseed »

baxtr wrote: post #44
threeseed wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK is an island and is the worst country in the world per-capita. Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.

Yes, agreed. It’s embarrassing for the UK... my point was that there is no example of a western, liberal country not being an island that was able to reach zero Covid. It’s just way easier as an island state.

This island nonsense needs to stop.

All of the European countries were able to implement border controls as the Schengen Borders Code permits.

They easily could have had a mandatory 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals and had a similar result to Australia and New Zealand. They chose instead to mimic themselves after Sweden and opted to contain rather than eliminate the virus. Even now Macron refuses to impose a lockdown.

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#58

Post by baxtr »

gridspy wrote: post #54
baxtr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed. It’s embarrassing for the UK... my point was that there is no example of a western, liberal country not being an island that was able to reach zero Covid. It’s just way easier as an island state.

New Zealand is about as large as Europe. Larger than the UK. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-n...

With no borders to other countries

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#59

Post by josephg »

zpeti wrote: post #12

China and Vietnam get the virus under control by using centralised quarantines. I wonder how many people supporting the sentiments of this article would be ok with someone arriving at their doorstep, taking you to a prison basically whether you agree or not, and quaranteening you there for at least 10 days with other covid people. Perhaps they also take your family too, in case they are also infected. Are you willing…

Australian here, living in Victoria (where we had a second wave and a strict lockdown that took us to 0). They didn't round up the whole country and put us in prison (!?). The rules we had were:

- Stay home. The only allowed reasons to leave our homes were essential supplies (eg visiting the supermarket), caring for family, going to work (if you couldn't work from home) or exercise (eg going for a walk). Or if you needed medical care.

- Unless we had a really good reason, we had to stay within a 5km radius of home at all times, and couldn't leave home for more than 1hr each day. We also had an 8pm curfew - though I'm still not sure what that was for.

- No visitors unless they're an intimate partner

- Masks mandatory any time you left your home. On the spot fines from police if they catch you outside without a mask.

Basically everything indoors was closed - no gyms, takeout only at restaurants, etc. Supermarkets had security guards to make sure nobody entered without a mask on, and they had complimentary hand sanitizer at the entrance.

That strategy was enough to go from 700/day down to 0/day in a couple months. Those months were awful, but just about everything has opened up again now since we've been sitting at 0 local infections in the whole country for the last few weeks. We only broke our streak today - a hotel quarantine worker was infected in Perth. The city has immediately locked down to make sure it doesn't spread.

If the whole world followed the same strategy, covid would be gone already and international travel could have resumed months ago.

Re: The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

#60

Post by herewegoagain2 »

"He notes that a more infectious virus is more dangerous than a more lethal one, “because every new case will infect more people, and each of them will infect more people, such that the number of cases will grow exponentially.”"

Oh my god, that sounds horrible - except, that's how EVERY infectious disease works. We have been living with that kind of diseases forever.

Also, no, they don't grow exponentially. The population saturates.

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