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RolStoppable said:

Sounds like a village where nobody would want to go because there's nothing of interest there. That's exactly the thing, though: The hotspots are the places where there is a lot of tourism, but it doesn't take more than a few kilometers away from such an area in order to be a lot safer.


That's my hope. We live in a relatively small town (11K) with a busy tourist season, however that doesn't start until end of April / beginning of May. It's mostly canoes and rafting, cycling, fishing, people shopping, fairs and dirt racing on the local track. We get a lot of Asian tourists rafting. One time a raft full of Chinese were stuck in front of my house and after watching them sitting there for a while I waded into the river to pull them loose. No one in the raft wanted to get out lol. I have no clue what's going to happen to our tourist season. That's not safe with this virus, but a lot of the town depends on it. However for now we're pretty isolated from the big cities. It's not that far though, hot spots are starting not more than 30km away.


RolStoppable said:

When more than 90% of infected people have only mild to moderate symptoms, then expecting death for the majority is plain foolish.

I only watch Austrian and German news and the situation of Italy is talked about and depicted. It's why the majority of the population here and in Germany is fine with the measures that have been taken. The minority that isn't fine with it splits into two camps, of which the opinion that the measures should be even stricter is more popular than the opinion that the current restrictions are too much. The daily reports about Italy certainly feed into the fear of the people who believe that not enough is being done yet. But like I said in one of my previous posts, the way in which numbers are compiled as well as unique regional factors play a big role and should be talked about just as much as the plain numbers that get reported. Actually, methodology and what the numbers really mean should be talked about a lot more.

Growth rates are already on a trajectory of decrease, but not yet in the target area. I say it again, the measures to minimize social contacts are correct, but what I am against is that those measures get an extension; I am not arguing in favor of premature lifting of restrictions before Easter either. The big question on many people's minds is how long those restrictions will be upheld because for most people the situation becomes less bearable with each passing day.

It's a given that the local economy does better without restrictions than with them. Getting isolated by other countries affects only certain branches of the economy (tourism being the biggest by far), but there's a lot of business to be done within each country.


The problem is all the undetected cases that keep spreading the virus. You need to get the number of newly detected cases per day low enough so you can efficiently trace contacts. Ontario only gets 150 cases per day on avg atm, but still has 10K tests waiting results and 45% behind in tracing contacts. So no grasp on where it is spreading atm.

Austria sits at nearly 900 (1.05x 5 day growth avg) new cases daily, Germany 6700 (1.19x 5 day growth avg)

It is looking a lot better for Austria atm, but when I look at graphs of other countries, all exhibit big swings at the start and Austria has had a dip in detected cases last weekend as well, just to jump back up on Monday. A lot of countries seem to work a bit less hard in the weekend (not that surprising) It could go either way, maybe in 2 weeks it will be significantly down in Austria and ready to loosen some restrictions. It would be an anomaly but there's hope.