It’s also true that “rich” people with second homes and large residences (and airplanes :)) have a much easier time protecting vulnerable members of their family and close friends than do poor people.
I think anybody living in the countryside and able to work from home, or retired, has an easy time avoiding this, especially if you can get home delivery of food. If you can’t get deliveries, you can more or less – depending on your desired range of diet – live out of farm shops, or petrol station shops (visited when empty).
But I also think general intelligence / basically engaging with reality is a massive help. I work above a petrol station and I can see practically everybody just hold the pump nozzle in their bare hand. No disposable glove. It simply does not compute to people that this is a major risk. But it never did compute – even at the peak in April. It is not rocket science.
We still treat all delivered food packages as infected and process accordingly.
Airline travel is off the list.
Yes GA is great but we are well stuffed now due to the quarantine 
This will bring on the 2nd wave
Thus far, there is no evidence for that in the deaths. Why, remains a mystery to me and nobody else I have seen can explain it either.
The improved medical processes cannot explain the 100-500x reduction. And if the often-mentioned factor (mostly young people catching it now) was true to such a massive extent, why are the older ones not catching it? It doesn’t add up.
Peter wrote:
And if the often-mentioned factor (mostly young people catching it now) was true to such a massive extent, why are the older ones not catching it? It doesn’t add up.
The light doth begin to shine brighter. Even MSM now having to acknowledge that some have an alternative viewpoint to the junk we have been fed. They still manage to suggest we are COVidiots/nutters/do not understand, but the charade is beginning to crumble. Hospitals 
still very empty BTW…
On thing that makes little sense is these closed borders. Once the disease is established somewhere, I see no benefit to a blanket travel ban. If you want to, demand proof of being disease free or test at the airport. No one is going to get on a plane if they have symptoms; that’s not a guarantee, but better than nothing. This ban just seems like a rationalization of harsh lockdown policies (“if I’m stuck at home, how come people are traveling on planes?”)
I think if a load of people go to Slaganas (a party location on Zakynthos) and come back infected (which is practically guaranteed, and not just with CV19 ) then the govt gets blamed for allowing travel, whereas if they do the same thing on a beach in [insert your country] nobody can be blamed. And the media is hyper-vigilant on anything which makes the govt look bad.
The only rational reason I can think of is that the mere act of airline travel spreads it a lot more (among those travelling), especially when combined with buses at the ends. Wait till the next ski season, with the packed 2-4hr shuttle bus journeys GA will really come into its own. The gotcha will be avoiding the buses, but they serve only airline airports anyway (like Verona, where one cannot fly GA to anyway) if you want a cheap deal. It will have to be a taxi and that’s expensive, e.g. €250 versus €40/person for a bus, for Bolzano to Madonna.
WhiskeyPapa wrote:
If you want to, demand proof of being disease free or test at the airport
If we reach to the point where we can do that, test people and be sure, that will be one way of winning this war. But as far as I hear now, we are not there yet, not by a long run. Tests still take up to 4 days to be evaluated and even if someone is tested negative because he might have caught it just then on the trip and won’t test positive until in 4-5 days or so. What if, what if. We simply don’t have this certainty yet that is why quarantine is the only way.
WhiskeyPapa wrote:
No one is going to get on a plane if they have symptoms;
You wanna bet your life on this? Of course they will if they “MUST” be at that all important meeting or wedding or what not the next day.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Tests still take up to 4 days to be evaluated and even if someone is tested negative because he might have caught it just then on the trip and won’t test positive until in 4-5 days or so
In the UK, test turnaround is around 24 hours; and anyone who wants (i.e., self-reported to have any of the Covid symptoms) can get tested same or next day.
Only in the past week or this system got clogged so that people were directed to test centres far, far away; but two of my colleagues did this – made a web request in the afternoon, tested next morning, result next day. Both negative, fortunately.
So introducing point-of-entry testing is simply a question of supply; any longer turnaround is simply either a clogged up system or a poor process. By poor process I mean things like insisting on having centralised testing centres instead of having the equipment at the airport, for example.
The reluctance to use testing, or to allow people out of self-isolation after a few negative test, is simply rationing; this will hopefully no longer be necessary as test supply continues to increase.
Also – the goal is NOT to catch 100%. If the replication rate is, say, 3, you only need to successfully diagnose 2/3rd of people to bring it down to 1; which allows for people who are infected but not yet diagnosable.
On thing that makes little sense is these closed borders.
I think that depends on what your strategy is (if you have one!).
If your strategy is simply to keep the virus to a moderate level, then it doesn’t matter so much. If someone goes abroad, they are as likely to be exporting the virus as importing it.
But if your strategy is to eliminate the virus, or keep it to a tiny level, then the chances are that you are imposing more stringent measures than other countries to find and eliminate the virus. You can’t do this successfully while people are still importing it. The analogy of trying to fill a leaky bucket comes to mind. You can never quite fill it. Likewise you can never quite eliminate the virus if people are importing it.
A short (enforced and controlled) quarantine (say 3 days) followed by a negative test, or indeed 100% testing at point of entry with short turnaround times is probably a reasonable compromise.
Peter wrote:
Thus far, there is no evidence for that in the deaths. Why, remains a mystery to me and nobody else I have seen can explain it either.
I definitely think there is a real element of younger people catching it now. Older people are being much more careful but younger people are acting as normal.
Certainly here the average age of those testing positive has dropped by about 30 years.
Also there was a big issue with nursing home. They were responsible for a lot of the deaths. They have their act in order now, and those deaths aren’t ongoing.
But I think looking at the deaths figure is probably yesterdays news. Deaths seems to be under control. When they were happening it seemed to be most were in those over 80. Certainly here the average age of those passing away was generally 80+ mainly driven by the nursing homes.
I, personally, wouldn’t be very worried about dying from it. I’d be much more worried about having long term symptoms which seems to be quite common and the medics have no idea if they will heal over time or not. The data about how many people are affected in this way doesn’t seem to be published anywhere.
I’d also be worried about passing it on to someone more vulnerable.
dublinpilot wrote:
a real element of younger people catching it now. Older people are being much more careful but younger people are acting as normal
Older people being more careful is probably a factor, but an increase in testing will play a major role, too – previously we tested people who were ill enough to tun up at hospitals; now everyone can get tested (with some limits) if they have symptoms.
Is the raw data available? Iw should be interesting to see the percentage of positive tests per age group, that will tell us if the obvious difference in behaviour between age groups leads to higher %age of infected in each group.
With so many changes in behaviour and practices, it will be difficult to pry apart the factors, but together they seem to be working so far.
The big question is – is there something else helping, for example, that 80% of the population simply don’t catch it for whatever reason, or is it because of all the things we have done. Only time will tell, since taking 10,000 people and deliberately infecting them would not make it past the ethics committee; although cruise ships seem to have proven that this is NOT the case.
Cobalt wrote:
previously we tested people who were ill enough to tun up at hospitals; now everyone can get tested (with some limits) if they have symptoms.
I think that is very country dependent. Certainly in Ireland we’ve been testing everyone with symptoms for long before the current spike. Yet the outcomes (increased positive cases but reduced death rate) seems to be largely universal.
WhiskeyPapa wrote:
No one is going to get on a plane if they have symptoms
Honestly I think that is thinking how you’d like others to act, rather than reality. There have been plenty of cases here where people travelled home and immediately reported symptoms that “suddenly developed as just when they got home”. In fairness if you’re abroad, and start to feel something coming on, there must be a huge temptation to get home. Especially so if you don’t speak the local language or the local healthcare system isn’t as good as your home country or you don’t have insurance. And particularly so if the symptoms are really mild (initially) where you’re not sure if you actually have something or are just imagining it.
I’m sure we’ve all had a brief tickly cough or a strange sensation in our throat at some stage since March and started to wonder “is that something starting or am I just imagining it”? If would be very hard to put off a big family holiday or not to return home if you weren’t really sure you had anything at all. But everyone with Covid will start off with very mild symptoms.
An ‘Expert on talk radio yesterday opined that the young people are bored and are returning to too much of a normal and the virus is spreading quite quicky through them.
That oder people are being predominately more careful and at the moment are catching much less, so the number of deaths is currently low.
He said he expected that it will not be adequately controlled in younger people (basically because they don’t care enough and want to move on in life)……lot of reasons why, but in turn this will make it much more likely to re-spread among older people/family members etc and we will see strong death rates again.
He also said the low death rate in his opinion wasn’t due to a rumoured lesser strain or an improvement in medical care, although there have been developments.
He also said that it is not being reported how many young people are actually having a long drawn out reaction to it with a potential for long term contagiousness and long term effect on their health.
I have no knowledge but he was very convincing and committed to his point of view. Seems plausable to me.
