Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

The impact of the pandemic varies from region to region and no one can explain why yet. Japan has a very low transmission rate despite minimal government action. Developing countries and/or areas with warmer climates seem to have a lower transmission rate as well. In Western Europe and the US, cases double every 2-3 days instead of every 5-6 days like in other regions. Except for Iran, which had one of the earliest outbreaks. And Brazil, where the central government has refused to take action.

There's a lot of unexplained variation and maybe the approach in Sweden will enlighten us. But I wish the article talked a little more about what people are doing, because it may be more subtle actions that make the difference. People talk about the lack of hand-shaking in Japan as a possible factor. What peculiarities of Swedish life might be at play? Their transmission rate is in line with similar nations (~doubling every 5 days) but their testing rate is on the low end of Europe. Are they lucky or doing something right?

Not shaking hands has been the norm for some weeks now in Sweden. I thought this was the case everywhere?

The US and much of Europe is practicing extreme social distancing. I haven't had the opportunity to shake someone's hand in weeks due to the lockdown. In fact, I haven't touched someone that is not a part of my household in at least three weeks.

But Japan has been avoiding handshakes naturally since the start of the outbreak, which may have helped suppress transmission rates before they even knew the virus was spreading.

Most people that I know have been WFH for some time, myself for 4 weeks. It's not like people are out and about like they used to -- the social distancing is self-imposed.

Wasn't Boris Johnson dismissing that advice only a couple of weeks ago and shaking hands of people?

We don't really know about transmission rates, since all we have is case counts, which are only a lower bound for infection counts (which are likely much higher).

You can't look at the growth in case numbers and infer much about transmission rate from that, because it is constrained by testing capacity and testing policy.

But we can look at hospitalization and deaths to get an actual idea of which areas are being hit the hardest. We generally know how long an outbreak has been occurring in a region. The differences between Spain and Japan, for example, are obvious when we look at the start of the outbreak and the results (in terms of death and hospitalizations) at different weekly intervals. If the virus spread uniformly through all populations, we would expect Japan to look a lot more like Italy and a lot less like South Korea, based on the nature of their respective government responses. There are discrepancies like this all over the world.

For asian countries, I think the answer is wearing masks.

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