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

MedEwok you just restored part of my faith in humanity. I agree with you 100%.

Yet my prediction is, that even if we get a pandemic with a 80% mortality rate along the lines of what the Plague was in the middle ages, people would still behave like irrational monkeys unless forced to comply with measures at gunpoint.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver I wonder. Part of my discussion was the point at which people get really jumpy and even utterly petrified. In one sense the trouble with COVID is it hasn’t made enough people jumpy. This is partly because many still know of no one who has had it, or if they do, symptoms have been mild to very mild. The majority of young people do not fear the disease for themselves or their peer group. i think at 5 % mortality across the board people would behave totally different.

Just heard the Bolton outbreak largely down to one person who didn’t quarantine, went on weekend pub crawl with no social distancing and three days later got symptoms, by which time hundreds of people had got it!

This is a totally obvious route but most don’t get it.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Fuji_Abound wrote:

Part of my discussion was the point at which people get really jumpy and even utterly petrified. In one sense the trouble with COVID is it hasn’t made enough people jumpy.

Quite true Fuji.

Initially people really got spooked and therefore listened to the advice and followed the measures taken, out of fear that they might get it.

Over time, that fear has subsided with many and they think Covid is something for other people. Hence we see stuff like Peter just wrote. Add to it egoism and denial as well as balant disregard for other human beings. When governments started to ease measures, too many people felt that this was a free for all.

A bit like HIV. When it first appeared, Freddy Mercury and some other well known people died of it, people really got attentive and many followed the recommendations. When the death toll started to subside due to better treatments and no more news cover, many went back to their old habits, which means that today HIV is still alive and wider spread than people may imagine. And no, it’s no fun still, but people don’t see that when they take that Thai or Greek single vaccation.

Peter wrote:

Just heard the Bolton outbreak largely down to one person who didn’t quarantine, went on weekend pub crawl with no social distancing and three days later got symptoms, by which time hundreds of people had got it!

So he was required to quarantine due to what? Trip abroad and did not? I hope they will quite publicly punish him severely, pour encourager les autres like the French say.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

MedEwok you just restored part of my faith in humanity. I agree with you 100%.

Yet my prediction is, that even if we get a pandemic with a 80% mortality rate along the lines of what the Plague was in the middle ages, people would still behave like irrational monkeys unless forced to comply with measures at gunpoint.

Thnk you for your kind words, Urs.

I’m afraid your second paragraph is spot on. In todays “post-fact” World, people don’t heed rational advice and science. Rather, everything is debated on an emotional level and the whole Covid-19 pandemic has been heavily politicised for no reason. It’s extremely visible in the US, but in Germany as well there is a weird fringe alliance of right-wing extremists, anarchists, anti-vaxxers etc. who fundamentally oppose even the slightest change in their daily behaviour due to public health concerns.

I was very tempted to join the debate about government’s role in this pandemic, kicked off by Silvaire, but must say that after careful consideration, I think this pandemic (or any other) is not necessarily better confronted with a stronger or weaker government.

A country with a weak government would still be able to withstand the pandemic just fine if its citizens behaved rationally and followed scientific and medical advice on their own volition. No single regulation would be necessary if people weren’t so resistant to expert advice. The freedom to act stupidly is seen as a greater good than live itself, which is highly irrational. The fact that “normal life” could have returned faster if everyone did their best to fight the pandemic did also not seem to occur to many people.

Now there will not be a return to “normalcy” until a majority of the population has been vaccinated.

Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany

MedEwok wrote:

A country with a weak government would still be able to withstand the pandemic just fine if its citizens behaved rationally and followed scientific and medical advice on their own volition. No single regulation would be necessary if people weren’t so resistant to expert advice. .

Well, a very similar thing did happen in Sweden. The government made very few regulations. Most measures were recommendations which were followed to a high degree. One of the key principles behind the Swedish strategy is sustainability. While many other countries have been changing their regulations and recommendations all the time, Sweden has kept essentially the same ones since the beginning of the pandemic.

Sweden now has one of the lowest new infection rates in Europe.

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 19 Sep 11:04
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

I’ve been very impressed listening to the sweedish virus chap when he talks about their action and analysis.

Flip-flop Hancock does not inspire confidence.

Airborne_Again wrote:

Well, a very similar thing did happen in Sweden. The government made very few regulations. Most measures were recommendations which were followed to a high degree. One of the key principles behind the Swedish strategy is sustainability. While many other countries have been changing their regulations and recommendations all the time, Sweden has kept essentially the same ones since the beginning of the pandemic.

Sweden now has one of the lowest new infection rates in Europe.

Yes, I actually thought about Sweden while writing this. The main problem in Sweden seems to have been inadequate protection and management of care homes, where the virus wrought some havoc, leading to a comparably large number of deaths. Apart from that, Sweden seems to have weathered the pandemic really well compared to other countries with a similar death rate but much stricter lockdowns.
Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany

Related to my last post, I just read a league table of Covid-19 deaths, here

This shows Sweden, along with Spain, the US, UK and Italy, doing rather badly. Belgium, unnoticed by many, seems to have fared the worst in the Western world. And, surprisingly, Greece did the best job in the EU (I disregarded tiny Slovakia, who fared even better).

Note that I don’t take these statistics at face value, because the more you test and the more you look for Covid-19 deaths, the more you will find. So the death rate depends a lot on your testing regime. This makes Germany look even better by comparison, because we test over a million people each week.

What I also wonder about is why Sweden is so widely talked about, when all of its Nordic cousins, with a similar level of wealth and culture, fared better.

Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany

MedEwok wrote:

What I also wonder about is why Sweden is so widely talked about, when all of its Nordic cousins, with a similar level of wealth and culture, fared better.

Because we didn’t have any kind of lockdown while our cousins did. But, as I believe I’ve written previously, there was a big difference between different regions in Sweden. The Scania region has about 200 deaths/million pop while the Stockholm region has about 5 times that. So clearly the non-lockdown policy can’t explain the number of deaths.

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 19 Sep 14:22
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
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