[rtpg]

You could handwave that when we were at way less cases. But at one point people would start noticing (for example) everyone in retirement homes dropping like flies.

Not to mention that after the first couple of months, Covid cases are now nicely distributed amongst younger populations as well. Fatalities are still concentrated in older people, but cases are still widespread across demographics.

The facts are staring everyone in the face: when countries started weakening their lockdown procedures, cases started going back up. And nobody's been willing to go back in full lockdown, for various reasons. And so cases are going up a bunch.

Meanwhile Vietnam had some cases in fall/winter, and _immediately_ locked stuff down, shut down universities, and quarantined people who had even a bit of contact with people in positive cases. The stuff was taken seriously, and numbers stayed low because of it.

Maybe the US and Europe "can't do it" because of a lack of political will etc. But it's not physically impossible.

[thomasz]

Off course it’s possible to have a measurable impact. It’s obviously working for Vietnam, but I’m doubtful that the same measures would be sufficient for countries where the old and obese make up not less than five percent but more than a third. Vietnam could have numbers of infection similar to Germany without even noticing, especially if we are accounting for the difference in transparency.

But this obviously doesn’t change the bottom line: Their response was sufficient, while ours was not. This isn’t their Chernobyl like a lot of overconfident analysts proclaimed. I’d say it comes close to being our Chernobyl. Asian societies by and large did really well, and the pathetic response of the “First World” revealed a disturbing level of calcification and incompetence.