We don’t even know what “cases” really means. So many people have been infected and not tested by this point. It is estimated over 200k have been infected in the USA and have not required medical help or felt symptoms.
Italy has had a more rapid and intense breakout coupled with a vulnerable population and social customs that spread things more quickly.
I’m not British but their strategy of lock away the weak (old people and other vulnerable) and let the young/healthy take the brunt and burn the virus out is pretty smart. Unless in reinfected of course.
UK was the country that first wanted to isolate the elderly and get young people infected and immune. The current case count is a reflection of that rather than the lockdown which came afterwards.
Italy is almost a month ahead of most of the world in infections though, their first outbreaks were weeks ago and the source for infecting most of the rest of Europe.
A lot of the UK infections can be traced to Italian holidays, for example.
Even if the government does plan to lock down the UK eventually, every day must cost 10s of millions, you can understand the strategy to wait longer, and even to play it down a bit.
Also, it's important to bear in mind that during the time period the UK needed to impose travel or quarantine restrictions on Europe, Italy was reporting two cases of coronavirus total, the most recent of which was someone repatriated from Wuhan and quarantined. That was less than the UK. There has been a chorus of articles from every corner of the British press insisting that the current quarantine is stupid and ill-thought-out because most of the countries it applies to are reporting fewer cases than the UK. The only way the media and pundit complaints about the UK not imposing quarantine earlier are anything but a cynical use of hindsight is if they'd have somehow been more supportive of this before the vivid demonstration of how a country reporting almost no cases could doom us all than they were after it. Which is absurd.
(The reason Italy was reporting so few cases seems to be that they weren't testing people who were hospitalized with symptoms unless they'd travelled to China or had contact with someone who had. There were a few other countries like the US which had similar criteria on paper, but they were generally willing to test other patients based on clinical suspicion. Italy apparently managed to genuinely fail to test hospitalized patients right up until the point where, by sheer coincidence, someone was hospitalized with coronavirus after contact with a traveller from China who turned out not to be the source of the infection.)
The US, like most other countries, is only a couple of days behind Italy.
Italy had 100 total cases only ~20 days ago.
The problem with this virus is that it goes from 1 case to hell in only a couple of weeks. If you already have 100 confirmed cases, it's too late to stop what's coming.
We acted later than Italy, in temporal terms. Maybe earlier in terms of the infection curve.
At some point there wasn't anything to act on. Cases where far and few between and have been individually isolated for a time. There was no way to find community spread because there was no way to identify other cases without testing millions. And the official incidence rate is still about one in a thousand people.
Being an European this is totally incomrehensible to me. I'm not sure if America is going the UK route of handling the virus, but they'll be in lockdown soon and this kind of measures surely can't help.
Seems this virus will underline our social, technological and other differences. Anyone has any good read on this kind of subject?
NZ peaked at 150 cases/day, the UK didn’t start its first lockdown till 5000 cases/day. And that’s 5000 tested cases.
It was too late (even though Italy was bad and a good canary, UK politicians did nothing). Even if the country remains in permanent lockdown the virus will still spread now for months/years.
It seems like you're really underestimating the severity of the situation
I implore you to read up on what the situation in Italy is like at this moment, and to look into why the Danish government just declared Denmark in lockdown mode.
Denmark went from 30 diagnosed cases to over 500 in 5 days. This is with an aggressive testing protocol that includes tracking, testing and quarantining every person each new case has been in contact with.
To think that the US with their limited and delayed testing is at anywhere below 20000 actual infections by now seems extremely optimistic
Everyone will get sick -at the same time-. That's a really really big deal
There are also cultural differences, Italians like to hang out in groups, outside, personal space is much smaller, people hug and kiss and touch all the time. Also they're not really the most disciplined nation, lots of them simply ignored the safety rules, continued to go out, there were even some cases where infected people run away from quarantine.
And additionally the spread of virus is not uniform as it depends on social circles, so it's very hard to compare the situations using just general population stats. In South Korea one of the early patients infected more than a thousand other people, while some patients infected no one else or only a few. It's totally random event, and a few patients like that can create a huge differences in the spread of the disease. In Italy they've had the bad luck that early on virus got into hospitals and retirement homes, so the most sensitive population was massively affected.
It only feels like the US locked down earlier because we were under the false impression that we got the virus later than Europe.
Indeed we probably got the virus at the same time as European countries but had no idea because we didn’t test....that’s why we have more cases than any other nation except Italy and China (and soon will have more than Italy).
It's reasonably plausible that what doomed efforts to keep Covid out of the UK (and the US too!) was travel from Italy, not China. Both countries had pretty decent contact tracing for cases linked to China and those people didn't spread it much, the initial outbreak cities of London and New York had substantial travel to the worst-affected region of Italy due to Fashion Week, and the first exported case from the UK detected in I think Singapore had direct ties to that.
Also, something definitely seems to have gone seriously wrong with Italy's response - they were detecting zero cases up until way too soon before their hospitals collapsed, which suggests they were doing a worse job of testing people hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms than even the US which had screwed up so badly it had an official policy of not doing so due to test shortages. Trouble is, Italy is currently run by the kind of technocrats the media likes, so there was no incentive to drag them through the mud. Instead the press spun other countries as worse because they weren't caught by surprise like Italy and so should've done better, without asking questions about how that surprise happened exactly.
Compared to some Western European countries, the US are looking pitiful. Italy went from 5000 cases/day in early April to 2000 now and Germany from 7000 cases/day to 1500 now. The US continues with 25000 new cases every day and no downward trajectory in sight. This is community transmission, not imported cases.
Football matches and Womens March right when the cases were starting to get bad must have been a contributor. Spanish and Italian culture are quite physical compared to the UK, people greet with kisses. Cities are quite dense.
Now that the virus is out there, they are trying to make up for it retroactively with overly strict measures.
While that may be true and could only really be resolved by testing 100% of the population please do show me another democratic, developed and wealthy country where systematic massaging of facts and numbers is so widespread.
You may have a number of conservative talking heads in the UK yelling for reopening, but in no other place I know of the virus is actually a partisan issue.
One of the reasons, in my book, why the US response is so terrible compared to just about every other rich country.
Not only was the UK considered to have some of the best pandemic planning in the world prior to Covid hitting, there was pretty aggressive contact tracing and testing here early on, based as you'd expect on what the UK did to keep SARS and MERS out. The elephant in the room here seems to be Italy, which appears to have been reporting zero cases up until the point somewhere in the rough ballpark of 1% of their population was infected. This kind of early contact tracing and testing just doesn't work if you have no idea who to test or trace the contacts of, and being a major travel hub next door to a country with massive undetected community spread seems pretty fatal. Now, the UK did end up abandoning contact tracing around the time of the first lockdown, but that was long after it had already clearly failed.
Exactly, joering is entirely wrong in his bizarre analysis. Outbreaks have a stochastic quality to them. If a certain individual doesn't hit a certain country first, you are likely to see false evidence that that country hit later has some sort of inborn advantage in fighting the virus. This is nonsense until proven otherwise. Italy has a huge trade with China in textiles, leathergoods, and machine tools. There is a significantly more cross-border travel between the two countries than say France. It is likely only a matter of a week or two before France and Germany and Spain and then the UK experience similar numbers as Italy. That is, unless those later developing countries prepare by implementing social distancing and robust testing early. It looks like they are, so hopefully the growth rate will be a lot slower and health care systems will not be overwhelmed. In the U.S., we are a bit behind and it may go quite badly or our isolation and lower density may provide the needed slowing to implement effective systems. We shall see.
Germans haven't been told repeatedly they have a patriotic duty to avoid hospitals to save their national treasure.
The British numbers are public and speak for themselves. ER attendance halved. Cardiac patients halved. People stopped going to hospitals when they needed to - luckily Germany avoided socialised healthcare and hospitals are just seen as normal companies.
As for Italy, there have been similar problems there with elderly homes in particular and hospitals struggling with staffing sure to lockdowns and isolation.
Ultimately this is the same virus everywhere. It doesn't look like it though. So differences in national performances are telling us a lot of important things about how governments have reacted.
The question I ask when I see these graphs indicating “days behind Italy” is why is Italy ahead? As if cities like NYC didn’t have anyone from Wuhan enter while sick?
We all had essentially the same “day 0”. We are moving much slower than Italy. There are other reasons (and not Italian incompetence) why they are in a greater crisis than others in the West.
Most countries are well ahead of them in this regard. The UK strategy is sound in that you don’t need testing - the hospital numbers indicate and can be extrapolated.
Italy has had a more rapid and intense breakout coupled with a vulnerable population and social customs that spread things more quickly.
I’m not British but their strategy of lock away the weak (old people and other vulnerable) and let the young/healthy take the brunt and burn the virus out is pretty smart. Unless in reinfected of course.
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