Belgian here, the covid situation is being handled very poorly. The rules change frequently and are badly communicated, the three main regions (Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia) all have different set of rules and information is contradicting.
E.g Flanders: Schools are not a problem vs Wallonia: Schools are a problem.
I agree the handling by our politicians seems incompetent, visionless, after the fact, ...
But I have the impression Belgium is not unique here. Most of the first world is doing bad.
I get the impression our political generation is systemically mismanaging for at least 20 years, and this crisis is the first of a level that makes it extremely obvious in all our countrys at the same time.
> I get the impression our political generation is systemically mismanaging for at least 20 years, and this crisis is the first of a level that makes it extremely obvious in all our countrys at the same time.
The new generation won't be any better. There simply aren't enough people who care enough to enter politics or do something about the situation. The system hasn't changed and the people that enter politics will still largely be those who do it for personal gain.
We all like to complain, but the majority won't do a thing because it cares more about which series, useless gadget or trend was released recently. And when we (the majority) do go to the polls, we vote for personal gain, not for the good of others.
> The rules change frequently and are badly communicated
Same in France. I really wonder who takes decisions and on what basis. Some rules are ridiculous. Right now, there's a curfew in most of the country. There are exceptions though. For instance, you need to sign a document if you want to walk your dog after 9 pm (the document attests you're indeed walking your dog). And of course, you have to wear a mask, even though the streets are empty.
Wouldn’t the actual presence of a dog be better evidence of a dog walk than a paper saying you’re walking a dog?
This sounds like a rejected Monty Python sketch. “Pardon, monsieur; why are you out after curfew?” “I’m walking my dog!” “What dog?” “I have the paperwork right here.” “Very well; bonne nuit!”
It is to have people have the time they went out and the place they are staying at written (or on an app actually) so it can be checked during controls.
If it wasn't mandatory, people could stay out all night and go wherever they wanted provided they were bringing a dog with them.
Also, there's an enormous lack of any personal commitment to make meaningful changes in their day-to-day life, at least among the Belgians I know. Civic-mindedness is most certainly _not_ a Belgian virtue.
I don't believe you. I think it's only Trump and the US doing a poor job and you're misrepresenting or overreacting. Or perhaps you don't realize it's actually Trump's fault for your country's poor handling of the situation? Happy to help you understand the situation better, take care + be well.
Medical personnel that are sick but symptomless were allowed to work for a while now.BBC is at its best, conflating the perilous situation in Liège with a clickbait title.
Sweden and Belarus handled pandemic by not doing lockdowns. In Sweden for the last 3 months only 0-3 people a day die with covid-19. There is no second wave like in other European countries.
https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se
1) The data you showed literally displays a full blown tidal wave 'second wave' hitting Sweden, 1500 cases/day in a country of 8M people and growing exponentially is absolutely a 'second wave'. Seriously, what are you looking at? That rate of expansion, if not controlled with further social modifications, will overwhelm the country in about 3 weeks.
(Remember that quite some number of people need to be hospitalized, that the hospitals have to refuse other patients, that it will force other lockdowns, and it eventually will trickle to the older people - who will die.)
2) Sweden avoided an 'initial lockdown' but most countries only did a 'lock down' for several weeks. Otherwise, a lot of the de-facto policies have been quite similar. As of 4 weeks ago I suggest Sweden was 'on par' with the rest of the Western world.
The data is right in your graph. Right now it's almost 1.5K infections per day, it's about a 3 week doubling rate. So 6K new infections / day in 3-6 weeks - at almost any % of those needing hospitalizations, they will be overwhelmed.
Whatever Sweden did at the end of June, where you can see a precipitous drop - they will obviously have to do again.
Given all the street fights and unrest in Belarus I really don't know what to think of their official numbers - like in any dictatorship, there might a great deal of "lets make it look good to the world" in there.
Trump gets most of the attention, but this whole pandemic has laid plain how liberal republics have been hollowed out by neoliberalism over the past few decades. The capability for broad, fast, collective action has been all-but wiped out, even in the supposedly enlightened and well-run countries of Western Europe. The nations that defeated fascism are crippled by a far weaker threat.
I can't think of another liberal democracy besides NZ that has handled COVID well, and they are a small island country. It's embarrassing, because the response has been terrible on both purely financial and humanitarian levels.
The problem is that the definition of "handling COVID well" that everyone seems to expect is stopping it in its tracks and wiping it out, and doing that with a respiratory disease that's this infectious and has such mild symptoms for so many people falls outside the scope of what traditional pandemic planning in Western countries even tries to achieve. Bluntly, no-one knows how to do it. As far as I can tell, the conventional wisdom used to be that it's just not possible. New Zealand has some fundamental advantages that put it in a better position to achieve this than anyone else (island, long way from other countries, relatively low population) but even they're having a bit of a time sustaining it.
Now, you're probably right that a few decades ago the response to something like Covid wouldn't be seen as such a disaster - but that's mostly because expectations were different back then. If you take a look at some of the flu pandemics, they were a mess in terms of things like school closures and other measures, but as far as I can tell this was just seen as normal and inevitable.
(Obviously, countries which had bad experiences with SARS do have very different pandemic planning - but SARS was a much better candidate for cotainment and elimination than Covid is.)
I wonder if mask wearing is the biggest factor and more generally, willingness to comply with restrictions due to experiencing SARS.
Japan's politicans are no less incompetent than other 1st world countries and geographically they should be much worse off but their cases are way down compared to other places.
The official case numbers in Japan probably drastically undercount the number of infections due to limited testing. A recent antibody seroprevalence study found 46% positive. It wasn't a truly random sample but had a large study population from multiple locations. If mask wearing is such a big factor than how did so many people get infected?
Because Japan's population is so elderly, any severe undercount of infections would show up as very large excess mortality, but that hasn't been observed.
I'm not sure Japan had a geographical disadvantage. Generally speaking, the closer countries were to Italy the worse they seemed to do at least at first, and Japan is a long way from Italy.
There were workers in the Italian fashion industry who came straight from Wuhan. That was the whole reason they had a step-function for initial infection.
After a (relatively) small second wave spike in one of the states (Victoria) which is now under control, there are very few cases of community transmission.
It’s the result of a combination of: controlled island borders, unpopular but effective internal hard borders between some states, mandatory managed hotel quarantine for inbound passengers, well-executed contact tracing by health departments, broad access to PCR testing now returning results usually within 12-24 hours, and a population that’s been surprising willing to “take one for the team” and go into lockdowns and wear masks when needed.
No, never really. What blows my mind is that the French haven't mandated work from home for all office-workers, even with the number of cases they are seeing.
Essentially, the EU (in general) had a terrible first wave, and then said well we need the summer for our economies, and now we are paying the price for that.
I see you're getting replies that (correctly) claim there are other states that handled it well. But those are exceptions to the rule of "western societies didn't and don't handle the pandemic very gracefully."
Mind you, I am not advocating to follow an authoritarian/Chinese model.
But the analysis that neoliberalism (and the hyper-individualist mentality that it co-evolved with) have undermined any collective effort at containing this effectively seems valid to me, or at least worthy of discussion.
Financially, we have eroded our capability to respond to this in a timely manner. Our healthcare and test/trace capabilities were simply not up to snuff, even though the people that know most about them kept sounding the alarms.
Philosophically (and IMHO this is the more contestable part of my opinion) our individualist societies have eroded our capability to demand (let alone volunteer!) personal sacrifice for a collective good, even one that indirectly benefits us and our direct peers.
Alas, give the developments and debate around this, I don't see anyone working through this after the fact. We'll all want to move on, forget that 2020 ever existed, and hope that economic growth will lead us into the golden twenties we've all been waiting for.
This time it will definitely work and not screw us all over in the next cycle, we'll say. Or at least next time I will be on the winning side! Just you wait!
Japan and Canada seem to have done relatively well, as have the Nordic countries (perhaps with the exception of Sweden which is TBD). The Baltic nations have done reasonably well too. Looking outside of Europe and the OECD, African democracies like Rawanda have kept the virus in check without draconian measures.
Having good or at least recently tested public health infrastructure and lucking into a good head of state/governing coalition seems to be key.
Strangely, although Canada was much better prepared (from SARS-1 in 2003) than the USA (CDC fiasco) and their politicians listened to "science", they haven't done as well as expected.
Their death rate is half that of the USA so far, but that's still almost 10,000 dead for a population of 37 million, vs. 200,000 dead for US population of 320 million.
Some of the spread and deaths were from farm labor continuing to cross the border from Mexico to Ontario during the lockdown.
Japan/Korea are not as liberal as US/western europe though. And danemark/norway/sweden/finland or the baltic countries in general are more socialist that enven France, really.
Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Estonia all rank higher in economic freedom than the US and have more direct democracies. The US literally wrote Japan's constitution. France stands out as having the most powerful executive branch of any of these countries.
That the US 'wrote' Japanese constitution is a technical artifact.
99% of their culture is not based on the cultural vestiges as we articulate then 'in law'.
They technically have some institutions which mirror 'Western Liberal Democracy' but they are not remotely like Western nations in that sense.
Taiwan, Singapore are also technically a lot like 'Western Liberal Democracies' but we can see they absolutely are not, right there in their COVID responses.
I think that's misses my point a bit. What I'm trying to say is that Japan has strong protection for freedom of speech, assembly, and general civil liberties especially as compared to Singapore. I don't know very much about Taiwan. While culturally quite different, Japan has a fairly familiar government from a western perspective, and civic life that seem roughly comparable(IMHO).
That is mostly true. However, I would note that Ireland were kinda screwed in some respects by the border with Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK and thus has the incredibly poor response of England and the Tories. We've definitely made a bunch of mistakes, but it would have been a lot easier to deal with Covid were it not for the border (and our vast under-investment in our health service over the last 20-30 years).
It's worth noting that the UK cases are far worse than they seem, as uniquely amongst European nations, they only test symptomatic people, even though we know that asymptomatic spread is a big problem with Covid.
In the US, that “the capability for broad, fast, collective action has been all-but wiped out” is not a consequence of liberalism, neo- or otherwise, but of a deliberate strategy of those most vehemently opposed to it in any form (real or imagined.)
It's obviously a bad sign if they are even thinking of resorting to this ... the 'second wave lockdowns' are a failure of leadership in most of the West.
The '1st wave' was understandable - crude measures in an emergency, fair enough.
But should have a much more nuanced understanding of the situation by now, and be able to focus on smart but clear policies.
There was a 'sweet spot' coming out of the lockdowns that would work well, but we moved past it, and how we're playing a game of 'back and forth'.
For example, we probably don't need lockdowns or curfews at all, they are a little totalitarian and probably do nothing but get people super mad.
We probably need to stop social gatherings of all kinds, limit social bubbles to nuclear units.
On TikTok I see way, way too much intermingling among especially young people who are unambiguously driving the second wave.
We also probably need to support our local businesses as we can and 'keep things moving' i.e. 'Remember to Get Takeout'.
In Canada Unis opened up, there were house parties, dorm parties, bars with drunk student what the goddam hell were they thinking? How about: nobody in your house/dorm unless they live there, 'outdoor beer gardens' only, limit 2 beers.
Have a 'dance party' in a big open parking lot to break the social malaise. Otherwise threaten expel students who break the established rules for putting other people's lives at risk.
We have almost stopped talking about 'isolation' and we have no support for it. In Taiwan, they send you home, show up at your door with masks, call you every day to check up on you. That kind of 'nudging' would be hugely impactful, it's also a form of tracing.
> In Canada Unis opened up, there were house parties, dorm parties, bars with drunk student what the goddam hell were they thinking? How about: nobody in your house/dorm unless they live there, 'outdoor beer gardens' only, limit 2 beers. Have a 'dance party' in a big open parking lot to break the social malaise. Otherwise threaten expel students who break the established rules for putting other people's lives at risk.
They were thinking "My risk from COVID is exceptionally low, as is the risk of everyone I live with." I don't understand why this seems crazy to anyone. More college students die from suicide every year than would die if they all got COVID (in the US, assuming that current mortality rates hold). Many colleges are even self-contained, in a way, because they're a "college town" wherein everything revolves around the college.
If there were a single group of people that I would say were in a good demographic to be out of quarantine, it would be college students. They're unlikely to die from the disease, they're far less likely to live with someone in a risky group, and they're old enough to make a decision on whether they want to quarantine or not. They're also unlikely to overwhelm medical services, given the rate that they're asymptomatic at.
"I don't understand why this seems crazy to anyone. "
? Because it's contagious and when cut loose cases literally widespread death, massive economic peril and joblessness ?
Why is that so hard to understand?
Do people not feel any responsibility for others they infect with potentially deadly pathogens that spread to large numbers of people?
We're not that hugely concerned about 'other people taking small risks' - the issue is the externalization.
Frat Houses can drink '24 beers' and visit the hospital, okay, 'it's their body' ... but the issue with COVID is mostly systematic.
We don't care that you as an individual want to bring 'Deadly Asian Wasps' into North America, it's not a big deal, but by introducing them, you'll cause calamity as they spread through the region causing mayhem. Or like setting a 'small fire' in a dry forest.
I'm struggling to understand how people think a their contagion is a 'personal choice'.
People who think about 'personal choice and living with the consequences' may want to contemplate the liability in such a situation: you hit someone's car - you owe them the repairs. Imagine if you had to pay for someone's healthcare if you were to 'infect them'. Instead of passing 'mask laws' maybe liability laws could be passed -> you infect someone, they sue you for $50-500K. We'd literally have to buy insurance for that, and one of the criteria for insurance would be 'mask wearing' - if you 'wear a mask' your 'infection liability insurance' premiums would be 1/2. It's obviously not going to work, point being it illustrates the systematic issue here, it's not 'personal risk taking'.
> The '1st wave' was understandable - crude measures in an emergency, fair enough.
The US is largely still in a rolling first wave; the separate nation-wide peaks are the result of the fact that not everywhere got hit at the same time, so, e.g., New York had hit it's first peak and bent things downward before much of the country had even noticeably been hit at all. There's some places that are in genuine second waves, but much of the country is still experience it's first wave (often in a post-lockdown climb after a lockdown-generated plateau.)
That's a great point - US overall looks like it's in a '3rd wave' but really, the 2cnd blip was due to different states hitting at different times.
However - if you break down by state - it looks fairly clearly that we are in a '2cnd wave' of a totally different kind: it's younger people driving the infections, and the case fatality rate is a lot lower.
Things are going really badly Covid-wise throughout Europe right now, and there doesn't seem to be a plausible path to stopping it. Even lockdowns are increasingly politically and socially non-viable. I suspect it might not be obvious over in the US because the press only seems to run comparisons which make the US look like a unique failure due to Trump for election-related reasons. (Seriously. It was amazing watching, for example, the New York Times switch from downplaying the severity of Spain's outbreak compared to Florida to ignoring it to turning the country's politics into a Trump analogue once the disaster became undeniable - and if I recall correctly this was ostensibly news, not editorial. France looks like it could potentially end up reporting more cases than the entire US in the not-so-distant future, and I don't know how the press will cope with that.)
So many people are getting ill but a lot less are ending up in hospital than March-April. I find the discussion about number of cases to be a distraction.
Not in Madrid. From your own link, the number of new cases in Madrid has been holding steady around 2,500-3,500 for a month now [0]. Since the average hospital stay for Covid-19 is around 20 days, the in-flow and out-flow of patients in hospital beds should reach a steady state. In fact, you can see from [1] that the number of new cases was higher in september than in october, so we should expect to see a slight decline in hospital occupation over the first few weeks of october, which is exactly what the charts show [2].
So if you start your post with a falsehood, what value does the rest of your post have?
The amount of tests performed in Madrid in that same period went down from 2500 to nearly 1000, so it's only natural that the amount of cases is going to go down or stay steady. Is there a dataset that disputes this? If testing has indeed gone back up, we'll see the numbers in a week or two (because data from the past 2 weeks is always missing large chunks that get added later).
I believe we're still in for a few surprises, and I can only pray the magnitude of those surprises remains tolerable.
The pipeline is cases -> hospitalizations -> deaths, with a week or 2-weeks between each stage.
Only 20% of cases turn into hospitalizations, and only a small percentage of hospitalizations turn into deaths... but that's the general pipeline. The exact % changes depending on population dynamics (who gets sick, and where), but the biggest contributing factor is the number of people in the previous stage of the pipeline. (If you double cases, then a few weeks later, hospitalizations will almost certainly double).
If a case-spike happens, the idea is to make a decision BEFORE hospitalization spikes up a few weeks later. We want to be ahead of the wave, not behind it.
Well I'm saying the Madrid numbers are not bearing out the prognosis you are outlining. It could be younger people are getting ill and that elderly people are better isolated but it's hard to know because they don't provide deaths by age groups.
If I'm reading that spanish correctly: its "Number of daily cases" (casos diarios) on the top, with "number of deaths" (Muertos) on the bottom, both in Madrid alone.
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The first wave is clearly wreaked by undertesting the population: Spain probably just didn't have enough tests to really count the cases back then. But for the 2nd wave (going until today), the death numbers clearly went up a few weeks after the case-count went up.
The case-count has begun to decline in Madrid, I think they're "over the hump" (knock on wood...). So looking forward, they're in a good spot.
But you can clearly see: when cases go up, deaths go up soon afterwards. When cases go down, the deaths go down soon afterwards.
not sure why you're being downvoted. The situation right now is much better than it was during the first wave. (https://imgur.com/nDgb7d7, representative of most countries)
People don't like information that contradicts their convictions. You question the "narrative" and they get upset. Somehow epidemiology became a political question I guess in the us.
E.g Flanders: Schools are not a problem vs Wallonia: Schools are a problem.
It's frustrating to see.