Peter wrote:
Yes; I am sure that will be the biggest of many lessons learnt.
Anyone who previously requested this was insulted as a populist.
Rwy20 wrote:
When people demand “border controls”, what exactly do you have in mind? Someone checking passports? Asking “are you an asymptomatic carrier of this new virus”?
Borders are just one more or less convenient (as already in place) way of containing certain areas which have more or less infected people than a bordering one. This also has to do with the fact that countries reacted very differently to the outbreak and consequently have very different conditions within their borders. If the reaction to the outbreak would have been one and the same across Europe and therefore the infection rates as well, then one could argue that it’s pointless to close borders. However, that is not the case.
Some countries were less affected for various reasons than others. The closure of their borders and imposition of quarantine for those who are granted access lower the risk massively that they will not get new cases from outside. Some of those countries have not the best health systems either, so it is only understandable that they do whatever they can to keep new cases out.
In the end, it does not matter whether it is a border or other geographical closures for affected regions, it is just that borders in most cases are the easiest to implement. Travel has been one of the most instrumental reasons this virus managed to infect people around the world in the first place, so it is quite logical that travel is restricted while it’s going on.
IATA appears to expect easing of travel restrictions in mit June if nothing adverse happens. Seeing that figures of newly tested infected people are going back now despite the number of tests having been increased massively would give some sort of hope, but it is now exactly that easing of restrictions would be a big mistake, as numbers would go up again immediately. Some countries will be able to ease local restrictions for it’s inhabitants earlier as they have almost no cases anymore than those who still have a significant number of cases. To mix people from severely affected countries with those who managed to keep numbers small obviously would not help. So it’s patience which is necessary now.
“Closing borders” and having “border controls” is not the same thing, you are mixing the two. I asked about the merit of border controls, which had been proposed in the post before mine.
but it is now exactly that easing of restrictions would be a big mistake, as numbers would go up again immediately
That is only if we suppose that the measures did anything useful to prevent the spread. Closing parks for example was probably not one of them. Keeping whole parts of urban populations away from sunlight and fresh air may feel like we’re “repenting” from our “sins” (and the more we suffer, the more we will please the virus gods and have this over faster), but it also has detrimental health effects.
As the Austrian expert rightfully said in the interview linked by @Snoopy, we have to evaluate based on data which measures need tightening (protection of nursing homes), which need to be kept, and which ones need to be (!) loosened.
Rwy20 wrote:
“Closing borders” and having “border controls” is not the same thing, you are mixing the two.
You need the latter to do the former. Greece is probably having to work pretty hard to control their border at the moment.
It’s fairly clear we need to keep the transmission rate under control to prevent hospital overload which is what the social distancing and isolation is intended to do.
No border is fully closed. In most cases, citizens or residents can enter, even if a border is closed. So the result is border controls which determine who is egligible to enter and who is not. And, in some countries, anyone entering is registered as they have to observe 14 days of quarantine before they can move freely in the country. If I am not mistaken, the 14 days quarantine thing has just become active in Germany, it has been for a while in Bulgaria and in some other places.
Peter wrote:
UK treatment decision chartVery few people 80+ will get ICU. It helps to explain why the average ICU age is much less.
No doubt every country has something like this, and it’s obviously very useful for preventing ICU overload. It just doesn’t get talked about…
Very interesting chart. Pretty easy to get past 8 points and then be basically condemned to die, although arguably the mortality rates among intubated patients don’t look to good either.
And no, we don’t have a chart like that here just yet, while ICU capacity is several times the needed capacity. But I am sure such charts are being prepared or have already been prepared, yet in Germany we are very wary of anything that even remotely tasts like “sorting” people into different categories of worthiness, for historical reasons.
I am sure Germany does have such charts, perhaps informally, because – to take an obvious example – if somebody is close to death with Alzheimer’s, you aren’t going to ventilate them. Even if there is a spare bed.
I saw my mother about a week before she died of that and there was hardly anything left of her. No doctor would treat such a patient. Look at how many people are dying in German (and all other) care homes. For each of them, a decision was made to leave them there.
Doctors make these decisions every day, and Germany will be no different.
The only difference is (a) whether this will appear publicly, and (b) in a given situation the seniority level at which the decision is made will vary.
In the UK there is discretion around that chart; it is not cast in concrete.
Cobalt wrote:
Please point to a single winter in the last, say, 50 years were we have been through worse.
Cobalt wrote:
and I guess I will wait in vain from @hmng to provide a year other than 2018/19 where influenza was just as bad
I’m not entirely sure I can contribute much further to this debate. As much as I have enjoyed the nice exchanges here and really appreciated and grew in respect specially with people with whom I disagree :-)
As I said, previously the data was clear enough that no excess mortality was happening anywhere. Still the world was panicking. Now we might have excess mortality in Italy, Spain, UK and others. Which, looking at Italy, is more likely to have been caused by the panic and the measures rather than from Covid. Remember that only 12% of death certificates showed a direct link of death from Covid.
The European monitoring, on pooled numbers, shows a bad year, but not worse than recent years
One thing has caught my eye, the UK is the only country with a serious uptick in excess deaths on the 15-64 age group
What worries me most, is that, not unlike the deaths of doctors in Italy, it will be shrugged off as ‘deadly virus, duuh!’ Which to me is like describing an aviation accident as ‘had engine troubles, crashed’ Does little to find the cause or avoiding similar situations. It did not happen on other places, a serious investigation should be done, without pre-conceived assumptions.
As for the question of which years had it worse; I could probably argue that if looking at total deaths in the year, instead of comparing weeks, it might still be on par with previous bad years. I don’t know. I came across this comparison in England & Wales going back to 1950. I guess we can see some really progress in health care, but the last decade started reversing those gains. Population getting old? Unhealthy life styles?
The other aspect of the debate, is how many of these deaths were preventable, and if the measures, which, again, were never done before and just copied from China, actually saved a single life, or much to the contrary, caused untold suffering and possibly quite a few deaths already.
There seems to be no correlation on measures and results. Sweden is discussed already a lot, but also Belgium had stricter measures, and sooner, than the Netherlands and has worse numbers. Portugal, declared a state of emergency and locked up everybody, much later than Spain and has a low number of deaths, practically constant in the last days. Besides the initial scare from Italy and the confusion in Spain, all other countries seem to be coping in terms of health care capacity. In fact so many Hospitals are practically empty.
But again, I feel that too much of this debate is caught in raw emotions. And like somebody said, people believe what they want to believe. I, faced with believing politicians, the specialists that politicians chose to listen too, and the general scaremongering media, or professors that spend their lives studying diseases, and now, calmly try to explain away the irrational fears, I chose the latter. You are all free to do differently, and in two weeks or a month we will know who was right :-)
The debate is highly polarised now, mainly alternative facts and new politics, in an ideal world we should have camp A enjoy their freedom and making sure the economy is running while camp B enjoy their lockdown and taking care of those at health risk 
hmng wrote:
You are all free to do differently, and in two weeks or a month we will know who was right :-)
I don’t think we’ll know that until next year, at least.
