We just have to look at the Lombardy. That's where it all started to go down outside of China. Now they have 16k+ deaths and a population of 10m. They still have like 25 deaths per day there from Covid which is like 800 a day if they would be as big as the USA:

Sure, they have many very old people there but it was a "great" example what happens if the hospitals can't keep up with so many infected at once.

Other areas or whole countries might have less problems to handle many infected at once but I guess it should make sense to everyone who isn't on a crazy agenda to understand that these lockdowns helped a lot to help the medical systems to keep up with all the shit.

Now they are all much better prepared and even higher infection rates shouldn't be as bad as they would have been some months ago but high new daily infections should be still prevented.

Based on that Harvard report you linked before, the virus were spreading since August, that would put the R at ~1.5 maybe even less. So you don't need to do much to contain the virus.

As for sweden R number, I think it has been below 1 ever since April 9, here's our chart from worldometer:

And here's how much testing we doing:

Vecka = Week, Green is positive result, purple negative result.

We were doing 20k test a week in beginning of april, last week 48k tests, we have started testing people with lighter symptons to the virus, that's why we saw an decent increase last week. You probably only need about 20-30% immunity in cities to control the virus if do no restrictions/social distansing.

I think the virus will be almost gone/eliminated next month in Sweden.

Coronavirus came to UK 'on at least 1,300 separate occasions'

Coronavirus was brought into the UK on at least 1,300 separate occasions, a major analysis of the genetics of the virus shows. The study, by the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium (Cog-UK), completely quashes the idea that a single "patient zero" started the whole UK outbreak. The analysis also finds China, where the pandemic started, had a negligible impact on cases in the UK. Instead those initial cases came mostly from European countries. The researchers analysed the genetic code of viral samples taken from more than 20,000 people infected with coronavirus in the UK. Then, like a gigantic version of a paternity test, the geneticists attempted to piece together the virus's massive family tree. This was combined with data on international travel to get to the origins of the UK epidemic.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52993734

I dunno of anyone who believed there was a patient zero who was responsible for UK outbreak anyway.... 

That is very optimistic but I hope your right.
Hell I hope the same is true in denmark (and still doubt it).

I think you said the exact same thing a month ago :p

More tests will of course reveal more new cases and ongoing cases. Sweden did enough to contain the virus, just not enough to stop people dying.

Stockholm still has reduced mobility, I guess working from home is the new normal



To get below R 1 by herd immunity, to put it (too) simple, if R is 1.5 without any measures, meaning on average each person causes 1.5 new infections, thus at least 33% need to be immune to infection to reduced that to 1. However while the country average might be 1.5, it's much higher in cities and lower in sparsely populated areas. If it's 2.0 in cities, 50% need to be immune to stop growth.

A lower 'natural' R due to it having spread for a lot longer than previously assumed, also means that immunity test results also don't grow much passed their 'valid' date. And definitely not when Rt is already around 1 or lower. Every little bit counts though. It would be great to know how many people already have (effective) immunity and how long that would work...

2,349 positive cases (-25.4%) with 329k tests (-16.1%).

On average there were 336 positive cases a day (or 392 if you discard Sunday).

492 in ICU (-22.2%)

Definitely still in decline but not as drastic as it seems (because of the public holiday and therefore reduced testing which I mentioned in my other post).

Not surprising but interesting to see the shifts they found.

The study showed that less than 0.1% of those imported cases came directly from China. Instead the UK's coronavirus epidemic was largely initiated by travel from Italy in late February, Spain in early-to-mid-March and then France in mid-to-late-March.

I guess in order of countries getting serious about travel recommendations.

The study estimates 80% of those initial cases arrived in the country between 28 Feb and 29 March - the time the UK was debating whether to lockdown. After this point, the number of new imported cases diminished rapidly. The earliest one could be traced back to the beginning of February, but it is possible there were cases even earlier that could not be picked up by the analysis.

And these are only the confirmed cases, the positive covid19 tests after people showed definitive symptoms. As many as 10 to 100 times that number of cases could have been imported by people with milder to no symptoms. Confirmed and traced back cases coming in as early as the beginning of February, it was definitely around last year already.

Borders should have been shut a lot sooner and the question remains, when is it safe to re-open them again, and how long to keep the mandatory 2 week quarantine active.



Despite a huge decrease of travel with closed borders, they are not completely closed.

From May 27- June 2, 2019, there were 1,076,529 travellers arriving in Canada at land border crossings. A year later, from May 25-31, there were only 137,786 arrivals by land.

'Only' 138K, mainly trucks crossing the border that of course don't quarantine for 14 days before delivering their goods and going back.

As for travellers flying to Canada from May 25-31, the CBSA said there was a 98 per cent drop from the year before with 762,620 travellers arriving that week in 2019 to just 16,939 a year later. On May 31, alone, the agency said air travel from the U.S. was down 98 per cent from 55,683 to 965 and air travel from international destinations had dropped by more than 97 per cent from 64,243 to 2,037.

A couple provinces here have actually closed their borders to everyone which is currently under investigation whether its legal to deny Canadians access to their own properties and funerals of their relatives.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/n-b-p-e-i-n-l-territories-border-ban-ccla-court-challenge-1.5600235
It's not easy if you want to eradicate the virus, only island states have that 'luxury'




Moving on to the difficult questions for a year from now

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/ethical-dilemma-who-should-get-a-covid-19-vaccine-first-1.4977914

How to distribute an eventual vaccine. Health care workers first is obvious, yet after that, do you first vaccinate the ones most at risk of dying, or the ones most likely to keep the spread of the virus going. I think stopping the virus should be the focus, which will save those at risk as well. And as they state in the article, any long term side effects of any new vaccine won't be known for a while, thus it might not be the best idea to use it on immunocompromised and those with underlying conditions first.

And then you get global ethical dilemmas

"Whoever does get the vaccine first is going to have a lot of power," Many countries, including Canada, China and the U.S., have vowed to consider a vaccine a global public good and make it available wherever it is needed most. That creates other ethical concerns, as the need to protect Canadians will be balanced against the concerns of those in countries where proper physical distancing threatens the accessibility of food and water, Thompson said.

That much is certainly true, but not to this extent. We have the reproduction numbers from the 2009 Flu pandemic and they didn't differ wildly between countries. It was around 1.2 in Japan and 1.5 in the US, for instance.

As for the latter news, bear in mind that memory can be incredibly unreliable and people have a tendency of confirmation bias (many, many people are retroactively crediting their usual January flu to Covid-19 even thought flu was the more common cause, even for cases with complications, by orders of magnitude back then).

I have seen some arguments about spread in France in late December and early January (specially around Alsace) but, as far as I know, any claim of putative earlier cases haven't been confirmed or reviewed by other researchers. Of course, though, the media loves to report in that sort of speculation.

Other posters have already addressed this quite well, but if anything 400k is likely to be far too low as that's only counting people who were confirmed to have died from COVID-19, not the many thousands who would've died without getting tested, particularly in the many countries where the amount of testing being done is inadequate.

Also, I don't know where you got the idea that developing countries don't have comorbidities that can increase the fatality rate. Sure, there tend to be less people over 75, but endemic diseases that burden and weaken the immune system are abundant in developing nations. Look at the prevalence of HIV in Africa for example. Developing nations also don't have access to the same quality of medical care that "first world" nations do, which will increase the death toll still further.

By the time this is over, the death toll will be in the millions. This is not something to downplay and scoff at.

To be fair, on all likelihood a 20-year-old with hypertension and diabetes is still some 50 times less likely to die than a healthy 70-year-old. And since 50 - 90% of people in ICU die regardless even someplace like Manhattan, I don't think health care quality will be as much of a factor as some believed. Remember, there is no medicine or treatment confirmed to help you with this. In fact, to try to treat it might kill you.

As for Brazil, since I've seen some people interested, research on hospital reports of acute respiratory syndrome and consolidated data from register offices on excess mortality suggest the true death toll is 50 - 100% higher than reported. Not great, not terrible (Peru and Ecuador are 300 - 400% higher than reported, in comparison).

It's true that the federal government tried to fuck things up even more, but states weren't having any of it and developed their own combined reporting tool, as did the media. And a ruling from the Supreme Court forced them to resume reporting as before, which they more or less seem to be complying (perhaps because to lie too much is futile now, given the other reporting tools).