Also, countries which did serious lockdowns are doing relatively well in the end (NZ / Oz)
Neither does anywhere else.
Other places simply stabilized at a higher # of infections/day, because they have worse compliance with social distancing, lockdowns, and basic hygeine. But even bad compliance is better than nothing, and brings R0 down.
Stop compliance with all of those things, and you get a second wave that dwarfs the first.
Sweden had a fatality rate of 583 per million. Denmark had 126, Finland 65, Norway 52. So in terms of regional performance Sweden was very poor.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
Sweden messed up, but not in the way people are making it to have. They messed up because their care homes and their entire care system for the elderly was poorly managed, but not because they somehow let the disease rip through the general population.
Of course scientists are finding some cases of people with symptoms lasting many weeks, but this does not appear to be common enough that special strict public health measures should be instituted for it, just like we do little to prevent flu or colds that affect a small segment of the population with long-term complications. It is the elderly demographic that remains the real cause of concern for public-health officials.
(Someone spent fifteen years reporting chronic pain to their doctor before finally getting an endometriosis diagnosis...)
> It is the elderly demographic that remains the real cause of concern for public-health officials.
Yes, and this is also very bad. It tends to sweep through nursing homes, and is often brought in by the young staff who may live in shared accomodation with other young people, or have children in school, etc.
but the economy is going to be trashed anyway if people are sick, disabled, dead or simply feel unsafe.
And the lockdown wasn't so bad, and the economy not so badly damaged if you did it properly the first time. - Life's pretty good in New Zealand right now.
Closing the borders is not the problem, at least initially.
Getting cross-contamination level between households down to effectively zero, and keeping it there long enough for 2 infection cycles is the hard part.
NZ did it.
Australia managed it eventually.
A number of Asian countries have done well too. Possibly off the back of experience dealing with the prior SARS/MERS scares.
Some of the African countries have done pretty well, possibly because of experience dealing with Ebola.
New Zealand gets plenty of goods via air-freight, along with a continuous stream of returning ex-pats and foreign workers. and ships aren't so slow that the crews (and goods) are automatically safe to interact with when they get here.
But it can be managed - we're managing it.
True, but it also has an open land border. There are a bunch of subtleties to the definition of island nation¹, some of which make UK borders erm… interesting².
¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_nation
² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_of_the_United_Kingdo...
Then you can't compare Europe or US with Africa. Just look at the structure of the population and the age groups, most of the African nations have extremely younger population than Europe - exactly the ones that are at the most risk are the ones that are a majority in a lot of countries.
For some perspective I feel it is worthwhile to point out that COVID so far has resulted in the deaths of only 19% less Americans than the second world war.
https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2020/11/05/covid-19-c...
So basically 67 millions French are under lockdown to avoid... 3000 additional people being hospitalized. Pure madness.
Usually if you look at death by "date of death" you see Gompertz-Functions all around. If you look at death by "reporting date" you often see a very uneven lag forming some exponentials...
Not merely hospitalized, but in intensive care units. Do you know how many intensive care units we have? 9000 people in ICU is the saturation point, that's why it's quoted.