What do you think of travel the next 2-3 months? Should we avoid it? I was going to travel to Madrid end of March for fun from Krakow, should I delay this to May or even June?
Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
61–70 of 111 posts
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wondering for a while why countries do not test people randomly like in phone surveys, i.e.randomly pick several thousand persons from a region and test them. Like in phone surveys you need to compensate for biases created from people declining to be tested, of course. It would be expensive, but it seems to me that it would yield a good picture of what is going on. Maybe I'm missing something obvious and th…
Wuhan's capabilities up until about two weeks ago were a max of two thousand tests a day. Even now, they are only able to test more patients because of horizontal scaling, aka building more machines to eliminate bottlenecks in the RT-PCR pipeline. The rest of the world is significantly behind. The test may also be run several times per person because there is evidence that there is a high false negative rate while pa…
Switzerland has the capability to run 1'000 tests per day right now, they currently are not at the limit for testing.
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, as a Swiss I can only state for the record that the government is not the enemy. Essentially: The government is us.
Swiss resident (but not Swiss citizen) here. I believe Switzerland is a very unique case in that the Swiss have a culture of local (ie. Canton and Commune) level decision making via direct democracy. You grow up wielding a certain power, and you know your decisions matter and will affect your everyday life. This ingrains a close relationship between the citizens and their representatives. What I'm trying to say is th…
Also, Switzerland is a small and rich country.
The smaller the group, the less hierarchy you need. I think that Switzerland is at the size limit of what direct democracy can support. In fact, it is not fully direct.
Wealth also helps. The richer you are, the more you can focus on your role in running the county and make informed decisions. That's because you have all your basic needs covered and don't really need to think about about your survival, leaving you open to higher level activities.
The classical example is Athenian democracy (the original). It worked because it involved only about 30000 people of the highest social class. Women and slaves didn't count.
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always found Switzerland pretty authoritarian. Try hang out your washing on the wrong day of the week/in the wrong place.
That anecdote has nothing in common how the swiss gov/democracy works though.
Exactly, there are no laws against being a Bünzli.
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#65It’s only a matter of time before this starts happening all over Europe. > England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, said transmission of the virus between people in the UK was "just a matter of time". He said if the outbreak intensifies, it may be necessary to close schools and stop mass gatherings of people for "quite a long period of time, probably more than two months".
Of course the most common mass gatherings, people going to places to do non-essential work, will continue apace.
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Swiss resident (but not Swiss citizen) here. I believe Switzerland is a very unique case in that the Swiss have a culture of local (ie. Canton and Commune) level decision making via direct democracy. You grow up wielding a certain power, and you know your decisions matter and will affect your everyday life. This ingrains a close relationship between the citizens and their representatives. What I'm trying to say is th…
"It requires a multi-generational cultural conditioning to develop the civic mind that the Swiss have nurtured. It is also not clear how scalable it is ultimately." It also requires ancient banking roots that enable it to sit on the largest 'pot of gold' in the world (1/3 of the entire world's foreign investment) and put the management surpluses into its treasury. And to add, much of that 'gold' was, and is, owned by…
You are probably being downvoted because the Swiss system of direct democracy:
-has existed for much longer than Swiss banking being particularly significant
-existed already when Switzerland was one of the poorest countries in Europe
Also, banking is only significant in a small part of Switzerland.
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#67Switzerland, most democratic country in the world, reminding people that it isn't just the authoritarians who know how to keep organised. It is very hard to understand how democracies work; it is important to keep an eye on how these things play out.
To be fair, it's very democratic (is it the most?), not very free. Living there you have to put up with all sorts of restrictions that may seem overzealous for someone from, say, Eastern Europe. And they have the same ridiculous bureaucracy (unlike the UK, for example).
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#68Switzerland, most democratic country in the world, reminding people that it isn't just the authoritarians who know how to keep organised. It is very hard to understand how democracies work; it is important to keep an eye on how these things play out.
I've always found Switzerland pretty authoritarian. Try hang out your washing on the wrong day of the week/in the wrong place.
That's what I mean by "free" as in freedom. It's a democratic country, not a very free one.
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wondering for a while why countries do not test people randomly like in phone surveys, i.e.randomly pick several thousand persons from a region and test them. Like in phone surveys you need to compensate for biases created from people declining to be tested, of course. It would be expensive, but it seems to me that it would yield a good picture of what is going on. Maybe I'm missing something obvious and th…
I'm still not clear what "testing" entails. I'm not going anywhere near a hospital to be packed with hundreds of other potential cases if I can avoid it. On the other hand, if we had a spit-and-mail test, this could turn into the biggest DNA harvest operation of all time.
In the UK it is now being done on a "drive through" basis at some hospitals. You park and nurses in protective gear come out to take a saliva sample while you stay in the car. Then you drive home, self isolate and wait for the results.
Re: Switzerland Federal Council bans large-scale events
#70I'm wondering currently we have 40-60 cases in other EU countries all originating in Italy, but there are only 650 official cases in Italy. Based on this, it seems that the infection is widely widespread in Italy and the number of "undetected case" should be important (maybe for instance with a lot of asymptomatic carriers) Is there any model to predict this type of dispersion? Any interesting article on this subject…
I've been wondering for a while why countries do not test people randomly like in phone surveys, i.e.randomly pick several thousand persons from a region and test them. Like in phone surveys you need to compensate for biases created from people declining to be tested, of course. It would be expensive, but it seems to me that it would yield a good picture of what is going on. Maybe I'm missing something obvious and th…
I am not aware of countries that test completely randomly. But many countries have so-called sentinel surveillance, where 1-5% of family doctors (general practitioners) send in samples to a lab from patients who appear with influenza-like or respiratory symptoms. This is how they monitor the spread of different kinds of influenza strain. In principle, if there’s enough testing capacity and it’s judged worthwhile, this could be expanded to also test these samples for SARS-CoV-2.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/seasonal-influenza/surveillanc...
This makes it sound like at least one German state has tested for coronavirus as part of their sentinel surveillance, but I’m not sure if that test was completely random: