https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3997009/
T28 this above seems a good summary of the point you are making.
That, and this too, more specific to this illness.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/04/science.abd3871
In Germany we have got a nice new tool for Covid-19 statistics: Corona Regional
It produces nice graphs like this one
which show how little the cases per 100000 inhabitants differ between rural areas and cities.
That’s a good map. Just as the UK stopped publishing detailed numbers 
Well, we still have this which has the weekly totals. I guess the “GDPR generals” have won the day.
It is very interesting that cases/100k are similar across the landscape. However it should be a lot harder to catch it in the countryside simply because the population density is lower. But it might mean that if you get into a bus with 30 people in it, the chances are similar.
The following does not look great for the UK quarantine end…
Croatia likely next, which is a pity because a lot of places there are “clean”. I am told Bol (on Brac) is packed due to the night club scene but the rest of Brac is quiet.
Did any country manage to run school/college exams?
Peter wrote:
Did any country manage to run school/college exams?
AFAIK these took place in most (all?) German states, although since education is the domain of the states, this may have differed between the 16 Länder
Our antibody testing revealed 1.7% overall have had it. 2.6% in Dublin down to 0.7% in the rural west. 3x the number of reported cases.
The UK didn’t do the school/college exams (as I posted earlier) and the result is a huge mess, with substantial grade inflation all around as expected. But “grade inflation” is a highly inflammatory term which everybody on the news is avoiding The problem which seems to not have been foreseen is that BTECH marks are largely from coursework anyway and these students failed to get the same grade inflation as everyone else The only solution to this political hot potato was, you’ve guessed it, to inflate those marks also… The predictable result is that loads more people are going to meet the entrance requirements of various universities, who won’t have the places for them, and from which many will drop out even if they get places.
It’s quite funny how far reaching consequences one gets from somebody in (apparently) China messing about with some bats…
Our antibody testing revealed 1.7% overall have had it. 2.6% in Dublin down to 0.7% in the rural west
That’s amazingly low. About 1/10 of the UK percentages.
Peter wrote:
The following does not look great for the UK quarantine end…
Looks like someone(s) paid a visit to Croatia at the beginning of August… ;)
The UK is publishing useful data again here: https://coronavstats.co.uk/england/localData
but you have to choose one region at a time; cannot aggregate them for the area where you live
I begin to wonder whether a better strategy to combat Covid-19 would have been to simply shut down all public live, all economic activity, all travel for four weeks, over a huge area (in Europe: all of EU + EFTA + UK, for example). Thereafter, no external travel (exceptions only in high-security quarantine).
Yes, it would have completely eliminated at least a month worth of GDP, and provision of food, water, electricity and medical care would still have opened avenues for infection, but at least the continent would afterwards have been “clean” enough of the disease to forfeit other limitations on public life and economic activities, which we are now upholding for more than half a year.
