Re: OT: Corona virus restrictions reduce death rate in Australian state of NSW

Better test and perhaps tracing ?...

Chris

Because Europe stops in August while everyone goes on holiday... and the massive number of new cases is going to spike the death rate... about now actually.

CH

tirsdag den 22. september 2020 kl. 00.02.57 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

students back from vacation?

That's certainly not the pattern in France, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, UK, Germany. The second bump is big but far less deadly than the first one.

Australia is having a pretty deadly second bump.

Sweden is interesting. Deaths peaked way *before* cases in the main bump, and then dropped off almost linearly to zero, as cases peaked and then plateau'd below peak. They have no second case bump, just a long tail.

It's not so much Australia as the state of Victoria, and it's had some 700 deaths in a population of seven million - that's 100 deaths per million. Th e US level is now 617 deaths per million people. That's a pretty deadly epi demic. Victoria isn't quite as bad as Germany, though a whole lot worse tha n the rest of Australia.

Victoria hasn't done well at keeping Covid-19 out of aged care homes , whic h is where most of those deaths have occurred.

The Swedish population got the message rather faster than the Swedish gover nment did. They've got a better education system than the US has, and it sh ows.

The mass vacation is certainly the reason for the bump in cases.

The death bump lags the case bump by about a month. Perhaps it will be smaller than expected, indicating that case management has improved. That's good, but so what? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from this? Or unwilling to state what you think, because you know it's provably false and you'll be shot down in flames? As usual...

Old news, you're well behind the facts. And it's utterly unrelated to the European spike. The numbers are in no way comparable to anything that's happened anywhere in Europe or the USA anyhow, and the deaths are almost all in aged care. What a surprise, that high density groups of the most vulnerable people looked after by untrained minimum-wage earners are at severe risk.

The USA had a pandemic of stupidity and sociopathy long before it had a disease outbreak.

Oh, one more obvious thing. The first outbreaks were mostly among old people.

Remaining old people chose not to go on vacation, or went somewhere very safe and were careful. The second outbreak has an entirely different younger demographic, much less likely to die of COVID19.

Those suggestions are an improvement over lame insults.

Now expand on the epidemiology of those ideas.

For you to cherry pick the ideas you like, and ignore the ideas that don't fit with your preconceptions?

You really aren't in a position to influence the discussion, because your "contributions" are essentially cut and pasted from other peoples propaganda.

Or maybe a real biological reason.

It's interesting that most case rates look like gaussian bumps with similar widths, six weeks roughly FWHM. As if that is basic to the dynamics. First and second bumps look kinda similar.

g is practiced and people don't shake hands much, has only 1/50th of the fa tality rate of the US where mask-wearing is condemned by some groups of peo ple."

You have an unusual sense of the word, "big". The US presently has about 1 % of the population demonstrably infected or 10,000 ppm. The total infecti on count in Japan over the entire course of the disease is 629 ppm or 16x l ess. How can you possibly characterize their more recent surge as anything like "big"???

What exactly are you looking for someone to explain??? The fact that in so me countries people relax their efforts at precautions with a resulting inc rease in infection rates until they can get it under control again? I woul d think you could simply watch those around you and understand the events t hat impact the spread of this disease. It's not rocket science. It is mos tly well understood epidemiology. The rest is just human behavior which is actually pretty well understood, but not well managed.

Only to John Larkin, who doesn't seem to think about what is actually going on, which is people getting casual about getting infected and infecting ot her people, which pushes the average number of people infected by every new ly infected person well above one - which gives you the rising edge of the bump - until they realise that this really is an epidemic, and get cautious , reducing the average number of people infected by each new infection belo w one, giving you the falling edge.

The bump isn't usually symmetrical (which a gaussian bump would be) but Joh n doesn't know enough about Gaussian distributions to be aware of that.

He's made this mistake before, but any post saying that he has screwed up r egisters with him as a "droning insult" so he tunes out before he can get t he message.

More likely because hospital admissions lag getting infected by 10-14 days and deaths by a further 10-30 days. You don't see all the deaths resulting from today's infection rate until about a month from now.

It makes the system very difficult to control since Western governments tend to take panic measures in quick succession as it goes pear shaped having made bad strategic decisions in the first place. I have no confidence in the UK government any more over their Covid measures.

Far Eastern governments had well rehearsed pandemic control plans after being bitten quite hard by SARS in the not so recent past.

The latest UK not a lockdown is neither fish not fowl. Not enough to make a real difference and bring the infections down to a level where the useless "world beating" track and trace system can cope but enough to really knacker the economy. Worst of all possible choices.

Hospital admissions are starting to rise abruptly as of today.

Only to your eyes. US looks like it is headed for another really big bump once everyone goes indoors for the winter (and so is the UK).

The rise can be as fast as doubling every 3 days. The decline even with fairly strict measures has a time constant of 2 weeks. Our lockdowns just are not hard enough to make it decay any faster (and bad management by controlling on *average* R rather than max R screwed things up).

Explain Sweden.

Which aspect of Sweden's lamentable performance do you want explained?

And why should we bother? you won't pay any attention to the parts of the explanation which don't support your bizarre delusions.

So, when the folk find out that there's a LOCAL OUTBREAK, they respond semi-appropriately and the locale gets healthier, on a timescale similar to the time that the disease takes to become symptomatic and get noticed. This is the expected dynamics of a population responding to the disease.

Even in a country like Brazil (and to some extent the USA) where the President sets out to let the virus run unchecked the public react to the mounting deaths in their neighbourhood and avoid physical contact.

This is pretty much classic response to untreatable diseases in the past like plague. The people do good things irrespective of bad government.

Brazil now leads the world with a linear rise in infections of 1M new infections every 3 weeks.

But they are not the steepest any more. That dubious honour goes to India which is rising at 1M every 2 weeks and will soon overtake Brazil.

I have my doubts that the UK government will sort things out. The new half hearted lockdown combines the worst of all worlds. Hard enough to seriously damage the economy but not hard enough to get the infection down to a level where track and trace will work effectively.

Sweden is nothing to write home about. Like the UK they managed to decimate their care home population and it is such a sparsely populated country that many people are in permanent self isolation by default.

They have performed very much worse so far than their comparable Nordic neighbours. Their strategy might still be proved correct if as I suspect an effective vaccine against Covid-19 turns out to be illusory.

The Netherlands vs Belgium is a much better comparison for pragmatic smart lockdowns that work vs blanket heavy handed policies that don't. Both countries have broadly comparable population densities to the UK.

They are now running neck and neck but Belgium destroyed its economy a lot more comprehensively and annoyed its NHS to the extent that they turned their backs on their Prime Minister as a mark of disrespect.