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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

I’d like to point out that schools are not open in the normal sense in Iceland. All the older kids school is stopped and Universities are shut. Our youngest is three and is in her leikskoli on alternate days so they can maintain small group sizes with no contact between them. Our eldest is six and only in school for a few hours in the morning, skips a bunch of more risky activities and is again segregated from other classes. As many businesses are working from home or shut completely a lot of parents have also opted to have their kids at home.

We’re currently in a better situation than a lot of places but it’s by no means without significant changes to daily life. It’s also a lot to do with the early response.

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(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22808230)

The thing is, your country reacted, decisions were made and things changed a lot, thus you at least can maintain some volume of classes. Imagine just thinking about something like this here in Spain. Our politicians are a joke, and society lazy and selfish.

Also just for perspective. The country of iceland has only 360K people. Their decisions are orders of magnitude easier to pull off.

South African here. We are 60m people (plus quite a few immigrants that are not counted) and we have a complete lockdown.

What is a complete lockdown? Food workers don't go to work anymore?

In SA right now I believe everything is closed to a much greater extent than most other places. For example, restaurants are not allowed to even deliver food. Only ingredients for preparing meals at home can be delivered by grocery stores. No alcohol or tobacco. Aggressive policing of the rules.

> Only ingredients for preparing meals at home can be delivered by grocery stores.

So they're also closed to in-person shopping?

No, that and pharmacies are the only shops that are open. You do get limited with the amount of people inside stores at any point in time. Also, you have to go to shops close to you, otherwise you'll get stopped by the police.

I think the comment was meant that if you are in the food business, the only option is to deliver ingredients. Some businesses that used to deliver vegetables to restaurants now deliver to houses instead.

But in-person shopping for food is allowed. I don't know what they will do in the medium term, because other services will have to start operating again.

I don't see Spanish politicians making more or less mistakes that other governments in Europe. Spain was one of the first countries to adopt strict measures to limit mobility of its citizens. And according to Google Mobility Analysis [1] Spaniards have mostly complied with it, staying at home at much higher rates than other neighbouring countries.

So no, I don't see a reason to say that its politicians are a joke and that Spanish society is selfish and lazy.

[1] https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/

Spains problem could at least partially be attributed to really bad luck (e.g. a Champions League game against an Italian team)

At least they cancelled the Fallas just in time or the disaster would have been much bigger.

Interesting, children are at basically zero risk (no child under 10 has died). I assume they don't want to spread it between parents via children?

Or other children and their family etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/04/five-year-ol...

A five year old with pre-existing conditions sadly died, and some babies have died in the US, but the risk to children is thankfully very very low (percentages tend to 0% for that cohort at present the deaths are so rare), and infections among children are probably being massively undercounted.

Kids can get infected although at a lower rate under 15.

So yeah and essentially that by keeping contact limited if someone does get sick you only need to quarantine a limited set of people and close a classroom rather than the whole school. I feel like a lot of the success here has been in being aggressive with contact tracing and people able to take the social responsibility to self-quarantine.

Basically, some simulations show [1] if lots of people from an otherwise-socially-distancing population all go to one central location, that increases the R0 (i.e. spread) of the virus.

This is a problem for anything that draws together lots of people from a large area into the same place - trade shows, sports events, music festivals, cinemas, conventions, busses and trains, food stores, beaches, universities and schools.

We almost certainly haven't hit on the most optimal solution - in my country we closed schools, yet keeping crowded metro trains running? - but it wouldn't have been wise to wait for more data to come in before taking any action.

[1] https://youtu.be/gxAaO2rsdIs?t=1010

For primary age children at least, though, there will be roughly one parent/carer per child gathered outside the school gates, which has to be a major source of adult transmission.

Here we are all standing well apart and the kids are let out one classroom at a time.

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