Quote: Durham Giant "My 14 year old son has a better understanding than you seem to
density in South Korea is 1,366 people per mile yet they have not had a bad a time as the UK plus being closer to China and with more links to the pandemic starting.
In Brazil it is 68.57 per mile but they have a huge number of deaths
That above should suggest that Other factors other than population density comes into it. One of the key factors in determine how bad Covid has struck has been political decisions on how best to deal with it ( although there are many other factors )
But in the top 10 worst affected countries the correlation between Covid is who is running the country ie politicians who denying it, refusing lockdowns, promoting herd immunity , effective dictatorships etc are big factors ie Brazil bolsonaro, Us Trump, Uk Boris, Russia Putin etc etc
Yes Canada may have big differences in distance between cities and maybe 200 years ago before people had Aeroplanes or Trains or Cars that might have made a difference BUT now people travel large distances very quickly . They don’t just travel on dog sled and horses . If you are in a pub in a big city in Belgium or Canada the virus spreads the same way'"
Indeed. A lot of "amateur epidemiologists" have been giving us the benefit of their opinion on daytime TV recently, including talking about "just shielding the over 80's as they are the only ones dying and letting the rest of us live normally" . Well, look at the numbers - around 50% of all deaths are in the 40-80 age bracket. No suggestions on how you would do that obviously.
There is absolutely no doubt that countries who have acted to initially effect a strong lockdown, and followed that with quarantine procedures to prevent re-entrance of infection and swift, decisive action when infection re-appears are currently way better off than those who have dragged their feet every time measures are needed.
I get it. People are really suffering now, both with and without the disease and wishing there was a better way. I do think that had this disease been awkward and a vaccine was going to take much longer then we would be faced with some very tough decisions and strategy may have been different. You must get business (small business's in particular) and the economy working again at some point or we all suffer more (eventually). But it happens that Covid 19 is not a particularly difficult one to create a vaccine for (it's all relative of course). I have heard it described by the people who first characterized it in the West as "clumsy". I have known since about June that we would have a vaccine deployed around end of November - beginning of December. In fact if the FDA hadn't been so worried about US public opinion on vaccines the AZ vaccine would have been with us before the Pfizer vaccine. If I knew that then the government knew that, so that's had a big bearing on strategy so far.
There will be other global pandemics of this nature, it's inevitable, but if we do not learn the lessons of what worked and what didn't and if we listen to those who think there is a radical approach that we didn't try that would have worked brilliantly (herd immunity, selective shielding etc) then we will have a disaster of even greater proportions than we have now. This isn't the first pandemic we've had and it's not the first highly infectious disease to spread through a region of the world. There are people who study this stuff and are "experts" in what works and what doesn't. We should listen to them.
