Silvaire wrote:
My take on it is that the population scaled data is very similar, the legal restrictions in California have no effect in relation to Florida’s legal practice.
California is recently doing rather worse…
Silvaire wrote:
My take on it is that the population scaled data is very similar, the legal restrictions in California have no effect in relation to Florida’s legal practice.
MedEwok wrote:
grocery shopping and public transport must be two of the main occasions where people catch the virus.
Infection is (unfortunately) not driven by regulation but by behavior of people. And regulation does influence behaviors in different ways.
Can’t judge about California vs. Florida, but in Germany it is interesting to compare the different states. Despite all the internal noise about rules being different and therefore not transparent, esp. in international comparison we have largely the same rules in all states. The infection rates / disease progression, however, is very different. Beyond mentality, population density, etc. one of the key drivers of differences in Germany is executive enforcement: While in some states local police has been extremely strict to enforce the rules on wearing masks and not meeting people in public and has shown strong presence, in other states the police simply did not care. In some states the ski slopes and other tourist hotspots have been in hard shutdown which has been enforced, in others they were officially closed but nobody cared that tourists are piling up anyways (and in some locations the police tried and has just been overwhelmed).
Therefore also if we look at Florida vs. California we do not only look at the regulations but also at what people actually did…
The most recent estimate of “Long COVID” (suffering effects like brain fog, unable to walk to the end of the street etc. after a period of 12 weeks from the initial disease) in the UK is 300,000 according to the professor of immunology at Imperial College London (Danny Altmann). I don’t know what data he’s using to come to this conclusion, but if he’s right, that’s 10% of detected COVID cases (and probably around 3-5% of all actual COVID cases, based on various estimates of how many cases go undetected).
MedEwok wrote:
The state of Bavaria will mandate wearing an FFP2/N95/KN95 face mask when using public transport or going shopping, starting next Monday
Masks have been mandatory here (shops, public transport, public buildings) a couple of weeks already. My county had a huge spike in covid tests in Christmas, and the administration panicked and turned to the dark forces. The major went so far as to say “the rest of Christmas is cancelled” on December 28, meaning people should stop visiting each other. In Norway each county decides this, and Norway is divided in 356 counties, so these rules are very local.
However, the police has nothing to do with this. The way it works is each shop owner can throw out (or not) people without a mask. If a person causes problems (for instance he could resist being thrown out of the shop), then the police or security can be contacted the same way they do with other things. So far most (95+ % IME) people wear masks, and the few who don’t aren’t thrown out. I guess social pressure alone is enough to keep the masks on for most of it, and people don’t care enough to make a fuzz about it if they don’t.
In this article from the US at least somebody is finally going public with probably the most common route for getting lots of people into hospital: young people going out, socialising, and bringing it home. Here, nobody wants to talk about it.
Their stats are bad: 10% of those infected end up in hospital. They also report mortality over 1%. However that might be a result of not all infected getting tested; it’s not clear. I am sure here we have a lot less than 10% of symptomatic cases (most of whom are getting tested now, I would think) going into hospital, but the US is the world’s junk food / obesity centre.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Can’t judge about California vs. Florida, but in Germany it is interesting to compare the different states. Despite all the internal noise about rules being different and therefore not transparent, esp. in international comparison we have largely the same rules in all states. The infection rates / disease progression, however, is very different. Beyond mentality, population density, etc. one of the key drivers of differences in Germany is executive enforcement: While in some states local police has been extremely strict to enforce the rules on wearing masks and not meeting people in public and has shown strong presence, in other states the police simply did not care. In some states the ski slopes and other tourist hotspots have been in hard shutdown which has been enforced, in others they were officially closed but nobody cared that tourists are piling up anyways (and in some locations the police tried and has just been overwhelmed).
Absolutely agree that behaviour of the local population (of “real people”, as Silvaire would say) is ultimately decisive. I wonder why Northern German states seem to generally fare better than the rest of the country. Is it our “prussian virtues” (self-discipline, acceptance of authority). Is it because our northern neighbours (Denmark in particular) also fare better than the Czechs, Poles, Austrians, Swiss, French, Belgians who border the East, South and West of Germany? Or is it, as you say, stricter enforcement by local police (I have no indication for the latter being true). Or is it because we are a protestant bunch who like to keep their distance from each other even in normal times, unlike the catholic south, who are more inclined to hug or celebrate closely together (carnival etc., which is alien here).
Perhaps it is a mix of all these things. A common joke in Northern Germany goes “I hope Covid-19 is soon over, so that we can return to the normal 5 m distance from each other instead of 2 m as of now”
Peter wrote:
Their stats are bad: 10% of those infected end up in hospital. They also report mortality over 1%. However that might be a result of not all infected getting tested; it’s not clear. I am sure here we have a lot less than 10% of symptomatic cases (most of whom are getting tested now, I would think) going into hospital, but the US is the world’s junk food / obesity centre.
Interesting article, thanks for posting. If I read correctly, their test positivity rate is now at 20%, twice of what we have here (11.8% in one article of the German Medical Journal, from Dec 22nd). The 10% of infected going to hospital sounds about right, but as you say it depends a lot on the local testing regime.
What also surprised me was the doctor being quoted of the chance of survival being 20 to 60% once on a ventilator. This contrasts starkly with about 90% of all ICU patients in my hospital surviving, almost all of who are ventilated at one point or another. Admittably, the 90% figure is from an internal memo in autumn, it might be worse now in the second wave. I also know that the 90% is high even for German hospitals, but most figures I have seen are >50%, typically around 70%.
While I do think our health care system is top notch, I doubt that it is that much better than Southern Californias. Maybe patients being admitted too late (as mentioned in the article) is a decisive factor.
LeSving wrote:
Masks have been mandatory here (shops, public transport, public buildings) a couple of weeks already.
Same in Germany in general and Bavaria in particular. What is new is that it have to be FFP2 (KN95 for our US friends) masks.
However, the police has nothing to do with this. The way it works is each shop owner can throw out (or not) people without a mask.
If it’s mandatory and not a recommendation, the police has to do with it! And shopowners not can but have to throw out people without mask. The whole concept of mandatory is exactly that in contrast to voluntary everyone has to comply. And as even in countries like yours where social cohesion and therefore compliance with such rule seems to be much higher there are people the do not, there needs to be a kind of “enforcing mechanism”.
MedEwok wrote:
What also surprised me was the doctor being quoted of the chance of survival being 20 to 60% once on a ventilator. This contrasts starkly with about 90% of all ICU patients in my hospital surviving, almost all of who are ventilated at one point or another.
Is that with or without people on ECMO/ECLA? I’ve seen numbers from Freiburg that they have to put significant share of patients on these for some time and therefore it’s hard to give a “what would happen if we had only ventilation” survival rate…
Plus: It’s from Ventura County Medical Center – they are a 200 bed hospital. WDYT how many ventilation cases for acute respiratory infections the MDs have seen there in the 12 months before Covid? One of the key similarities between medicine and aviation: Experience is a great driver of survival…
Peter wrote:
…probably the most common route for getting lots of people into hospital: young people going out, socialising, and bringing it home.
A week or so ago, the management of a Swedish ski resort found 18 young people socialising in a cabin intended for 3 persons. 13 of them were temporary employees who were fired on the spot. The interesting thing is that from media reports they don’t seem to understand that they have done anything wrong.
