[rimliu]

I did not check (and probably will not), but I have a suspicion that countries that had it "easy" in the spring are hit harder now. Those who were hit hard in the spring may have some kind of herd immunity among the most social active and hence have it easier now.

[kwhitefoot]

> countries that had it "easy" in the spring are hit harder now

Not all. At least here in Norway we had about double the confirmed infection rate on 12th November (771) that we had in the early peak on 26th March (423), 7 day averages. We are now down to 110 per 100 k people (14 day average).

But on the 9th March 17% of tests were positive, on the 18th of November it was 3.5%, now it is only 2.2%. But we test a lot more people now; 6k tests per day in the early peak in the spring, 31k in November, now about 90k per week, roughly 1600 per 100k people.

Here the second wave was regarded as rather serious but the threshold for regarding things as bad is rather lower than is usual in Europe; in comparison with most of our peers and neighbours we have it pretty good.

Sources: https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/#norge, https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/norden/

[derbOac]

I've had this same suspicion and wonder if some form of moderated herd immunity is in play.

[flal_]

French person here : I do too. My hypothesis, is that people most likely to be exposed, and to propagate the virus ( health workers being the best example ) had a relatively high prevalence already.

[usrusr]

Countries that made it well through the first wave suffer from underestimating the threat/overestimating their countermeasures in the second wave. Herd immunity has nothing to do with it, as evidenced by massive second waves in countries like Sweden or Belgium that didn't quite skip the first.

The underestimating/overestimating is actually quite easy to understand: everybody thinks to themselves that a slightly reduced amount of countermeasures should be sufficient compared to the first wave, because it's less of an unknown now. And they might even be right about it! But the same process happens on multiple levels in parallel while everybody assumes all other remaining equal and then they compound. Relative to countermeasures in the first wave, governments weaken executive orders this time (by an amount that might be appropriate all other parameters being equal), regional administrations weaken their execution (by an amount that might be appropriate all other parameters being equal), private organizations, from corporations to knitting clubs weaken countermeasures in their procedures (by an amount that might be appropriate all other parameters being equal) and individual weaken both their personal protection habits and their adherence to all those rules, by an amount that might be appropriate all other parameters being equal.

Nobody can revert all those compounding weakenings, the only single point of correcting for them is at the top level: in the second wave, you need considerably stricter government rules to get the same effect. And even they are only corrected in a reactive way, when the numbers become too bad, when the wave becomes too high. Hence the almost universal big second waves.