Cobalt wrote:
A few countries have major outbreaks – UK, Spain, Italy, France, Netherlands); some are middle-of-the-road (Sweden, Switzerland; US is too early to tell), some are barely above a mild flu or nothing (Germany, Denmark, Norway, Austria)Discuss…
If you look at the graph for Germany, you can see the towering grey mountains of excess deaths from the last bad winter flu seasons (e.g. 2017/18) in the background, while the red “Covid-19” graph is barely above the long term average.
Possible conclusions:
With a few countries to sample from, two of the three conclusions cannot be correct.
Covid-19 is not as deadly as originally feared
As you say yourself, plenty of evidence to the contrary, both in day-to-day clinical experience and in other countries where the disease took hold much more. The only unknown factor is the prevalence of mild disease in the entire population; if it turns out around 50% of people were infected rather than around 1-5% in the UK that would change the story.
The German health system has lots of spare (ICU-) beds compared to most countries
With the notable exception of northern Italy, most European countries never significantly exceeded ICU capacity, and a lot of the additional capacity created ended up unused.
I think all of this shows that the timeliness of measures makes a huge difference. Which with exponential growth is really obvious; one week delay —> 10x – 100x more cases, depending on population density.
In Germany, local hotspots had their individual ‘lockdowns’ long before the nationwide one.
I am a lot less convinced that the extent of the measures is as significant; Sweden would be a good case example but with timing and population density being such important factors, it will be very difficult to prove this either way at this point.
Possible conclusions:
Or d) Some form of this was around since at least winter 2017/18 in Germany.
I think that is unlikely if you look at the astonishing speed with which – to give just one example – one skier managed to infect so many people.
No modern country’s health system would have missed the rapidly and exponentially growing number of seriously ill people of whom many would have died without ICU. The age range doesn’t change this visibility; lots of middle aged people need hospital care, particularly in “modern Europe” where many are obese and thus are very likely to become visible to the system.
The only way it is possible is if the virus didn’t do more than a light flu and then mutated late in 2019.
I totally believe it was around in December 2019 and maybe very slightly before.
With the notable exception of northern Italy, most European countries never significantly exceeded ICU capacity, and a lot of the additional capacity created ended up unused.
I have no first hand knowledge but I am told that London came quite close to being overwhelmed. The Nightingale hospitals were barely used (just as well as there was nobody to staff them) but new ICU capacity within the hospitals certainly was. Two hospitals came close to running out of Oxygen and one had to helicopter patients out of intensive care as the pressure was starting to drop.
For an intensivist that has to be the medical equivalent of that nightmare where the joystick comes off in your hand.
Peter wrote:
At about 5% of the population, that is nowhere near getting a useful immunity
There in lies the problem with trying to extrapolate global numbers across the entire population,where there is NOT the same rate of infection because of the environment. For example in some residential care settings, the infection rate seemed to be on it way to 100%. Didn’t of course help those that were vulnerable, but it is not unreasonable to expect that the staff over time will no longer be a source of infection.
To a lesser extent living in high rise apartments means a different exposure risk, unless you get ocardo to both deliver, and take out your garbage and so on.
What is the % of NHS staff working that have had the virus, and what is the breakdown? I suspect it is not as high as across the UK government. 
My faith in the British working class has been utterly destroyed:
Inevitable really.
The teaching unions are all set to prevent the schools going back before the new school year starts in September. The individual experience for teachers varies enormously because what’s happening at the moment is all decided on a local level. For instance my next-door neighbour (village primary school teacher) is working harder than ever delivering online content, whereas my brother (head of mathematics at a large secondary school in a city) is being paid his full salary to sit at home all day doing nothing.
If the schools don’t go back then nothing really restarts properly because such a large proportion of working adults depend on the school to provide childcare.
The RMT will also prevent public transport starting back up for as long as they can.
Then you have the ‘leaders’ in the Scottish and Welsh devolved governments denouncing the UK Prime Minister at every turn and doing something different just because they can – they have to show that their ‘power’ is relevant. Every big announcement by the UK Government on this is preceded by the Scottish and Welsh saying they’ll do it differently.
Peter wrote:
British working class
Obviously the 50% is the British freeloading class talking, not the working class. Probably those, whose jobs have been stolen by people coming from abroad.
I dare not look for a similar poll done in Poland, but those I am in contact with are for the most part more looking forward to getting back into the office than not. Admittedly a fairly narrow sample, likely not statistically correct. I also know some Polish people that returned to work in Germany. Obviously they are not planning on coming back to Poland anytime soon.
Peter wrote:
I think that is unlikely if you look at the astonishing speed with which – to give just one example – one skier managed to infect so many people.
How do we even know that? It’s like that one petrol pump handle allegedly infecting dozens of patients. There hasn’t been nearly enough RNA sequencing like by the Cambridge researchers to paint a meaningful picture of the evolution of the virus in order to draw these conclusions with any degree of certainty.
How did we arrive at this “rapid spread” conclusion again? It was only as more and more tests were done, that suddenly we found hundreds of thousands of infected. One conclusion would be that they somehow all became infected in a short time span due to the unprecedented infectiousness, but the other would be that the virus had much more time to spread than was thought. Everyone focused so much on the working hypothesis that this came from Wuhan in January that they had massive confirmation bias.
French doctors in Alsace think the virus has been circulating in November: https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/750704/article/2020-05-08/coronavirus-un-premier-cas-en-alsace-en-novembre
