Corona / Covid-19 Virus - General Discussion (politics go to the Off Topic / Politics thread)

LeSving wrote:

The exact same things happened all over Scandinavia, as well as Germany and lots of other places. Everywhere except Sweden, the government reacted, and reacted relatively fast and relatively correct. Not by sledge hammer kind of lockdown as in Spain, France etc, but by doing things that:

Sweden also did the things you list. There was very little practical difference. I don’t understand why you insist that we did not.

And Spain, France etc. with their “sledge hammer kind of lockdown” fared much worse than Sweden.

Interesting article in this week’s Economist on Medellin’s very successful management of the pandemic, and no Bolivian Marching Powder is not a vaccine!

Airborne_Again wrote:

There was very little practical difference. I don’t understand why you insist that we did not.

Because of the number of deaths, 10-20 times more than any other Nordic country, and it is still continuing. Also, because of the particular “Swedish strategy”, counting on low mortality and herd immunity to kick in. It is either;

• Black magic,
• An act of God
• “Dark genetic matter”
• Fast and firm reaction by the government done by consulting other experts than Tegnell. Combined with daily and very good press conferences and surprisingly good media cover in general.
• Female prime minister. This has actually been a theory because all those countries with female prime ministers has gone through this crisis much easier than those with male prime ministers. New Zealand in particular.

My bet is on point number 4, then point 5 also a little bit even though it is speculative. Much less speculative than the first 3 though

Peter wrote:

Norway is a country with a small population, with huge resources, so the people are wealthy and there is not much fighting over resources like there is elsewhere.

Yes, but the Czech Republic has gone through this better than Norway. Lots of clever people there, more so than Norway I would say, but densely populated and with much less resources per citizen.

I don’t know. I think the governments ability to get people working together for a common good that is accepted and understood is a key point. Then it has to be something that works and gives results, results that everyone see in detail (detailed numbers, graphs etc). VG is the name of a typical trash news paper here. Trash news all day long. When this corona epidemic started, they decided (by some stroke of highly surprising genius) to cover this in detail, detailed graphs, detailed numbers from Norway, and all over the world. They even have detailed numbers and graphs for how many health care workers are on quarantine, for every single hospital. That web page has been their most visited web page by orders of magnitude, since they started with web pages some 20+ years ago.

UK patient zero probably identified – caught it in Obergurgl in Dec 2019

but the Czech Republic has gone through this better than Norway. Lots of clever people there, more so than Norway I would say, but densely populated and with much less resources per citizen.

I think CZ

• has not a lot of dense apartment blocks
• is well educated (communism was good at that; if you didn’t work at school, you dropped down to repeat a year and then the whole class took the p1ss because you were 20cm taller than them)
• has no massive underclass which for generations managed to avoid school while doing nothing useful
• most people are relatively poor (communism ended only recently; pop down to say Pribram and take a look around)
• people don’t have the money to travel like “always-capitalist Europe” does
• skiers were the immediately obvious infection vector and the govt both was able to act and acted correctly
• not many skiers who flew airline to the Alps, because it’s a bloody expensive hobby (easily a few k for a week for 2 people)

LeSving wrote:

Because of the number of deaths, 10-20 times more than any other Nordic country, and it is still continuing.

Per capita – which is the only relevant measure — Sweden has about 4 times the number of deaths than Denmark, which is a Nordic country.

Anyway, so your reasoning is that Sweden can’t have done essentially the same things as Norway did because in that case we’d have the same number of fatalities as Norway? Why then, did Norway do so much worse than Finland? Why did Sweden do so much better than the UK?

Why did Sweden do so much better than the UK?

Mostly the same reasons as Norway did better than the UK.

The UK is a much more knackered country (ex-ww2 exhausted, no US aid), under-resourced, adversarial politics, taxation being a dirty word as well as a political football, a big and thoroughly uneducated underclass (though not as big as some big old European countries) which is largely in poor health due to eating takeaway crap. And I’d say mostly having incompetent political classes in the last few decades, with near-communism in the 1960s and 70s which it has been recovering from ever since. It’s been doing well lately economically however – until this thing arrived. There are good people in politics here but most of them don’t want top jobs because they are all a poisoned chalice.

Not a good country in which to have an epidemic which targets those in poor health so strongly.

Graham wrote:

Is that the longest ever post on EuroGA?

Yes it was a useless attempt to counter misinformation being spread on this site by presenting scientific papers and publications that people can actually look up and then debate.

Since I made that the longest post ever, a paper appearing in Lancet Medical Journal came out. It stated that, not only was HCQ not effective but that it was also dangerous. So with that one study/publication the W.H.O., as well as several countries, immediately stopped studies, which were underway, with the blessing of our most beloved Scientist A Fauci of the US. He went on National TV to make sure nobody used this dangerous drug.

Problem: Afterwards (within one week) with many scientists complaining (100) that there were flaws and inaccuracies in the published article that appeared in the Lancet Journal. It was discovered that the whole paper was a total fake. The company writing the report had 6 employees of which the top Management was a science fiction writer, a porn model, and the owner, a businessman. The hospitals cited in the study never heard of the papers authors. Lancet had to retract the entire paper which it did. Now there are calls for the editors to resign because of the total lack of verification before publication.

Politics gives a black eye to one of the most prestigious Medical Journals in the world.

But hey, wasnt it the Stern Magazine that bought Hitlers Diaries for 1,000,000 DM? Or is that number wrong? I dont feel like looking it up.

P.S. Fauci has yet to publicly reverse his statement not to use HCQ which was all based on that two Fake publications. The VA study had by that time, since been debunked.

Lancet retraction

Peter wrote:

It is certainly extremely frustrating, on a daily basis, for those of us who have “gone to school”, to hear the govt messages which are addressed to the absolutely totally thick stupid and useless

Stop complaining and just obey.

In Germany (Bavaria) they are saying everyone will have to social distance and wear a mask until a vaccine is found.

Thanks for the Link. I really enjoyed reading the comments section. If any of you have been involved with a group of scientists in a heated debate its similar to a food fight with tempers flaring as each tries to protect their own turf (idea, hypothesis, etc.).

The thing that everyone is missing is that this has become a political disease. Now with the politicians locking down the world, even more so they have to justify their actions. Also the biggest bug-a-boo was Pres. Trump saying (I think the end of March) there might be an effective cure called HCQ. That’s all they needed to hear. Trump says Black so it must be White.