At the outset, I want to set out what this post is NOT about:
- It is not, per se, either an endorsement or a refutation of “coronapilling” or “coronaskepticism.” (Though yes, obviously, I am personally closer to the former position).
- It is not a judgment on how we should manage the tradeoff between lives and GDP/unemployment. This is ultimately a normative question.
- It is not even a fixed assessment of ultimate success in the epidemic – if there is no vaccine within the medium-term, it is entirely possible that Corona rolling through most of the population in most countries may become inevitable (in which case Sweden & Co. will feel vindicated).
- OTOH, if there is a safe and effective vaccine soon – or if technical/social innovations allow us to reliably push r0 below 1 at low cost – then Sweden & Co. may well feel stupid.
I think these are all pretty uncontroversial points that any reasonable person can agree with.
What this post is about is establishing just how well the ideologically highly ideologically heterogeneous “coronaskeptic” countries in terms of one of a state’s prime responsibilities (safeguarding its population) relative to culturally comparable neighbors.
There are now many online COVID-19 visualization tools, see here: https://akarlin.com/corona-resources/
I will be using Our World in Data’s Data Explorer.
Finally, an important note. Yes, there are a lot of confounds. Culture and general conscientiousness. Mask acceptance. Geography – population density, urbanization, international connectedness. Living arrangement. Automobilization. “Bottom-up” social distancing, which happens everywhere to some extent, regardless of government decree – and, incidentally, and together with the decline in international trade, also dooms the economy to recession, if a lighter one than in the absence of lockdowns. The severity and precise details of lockdowns vary across countries, regions, and time. Finally, even in all of the “coronaskeptic” countries, there are still substantial degrees of epidemic-related restrictions and/or regional defiance of central “coronaskeptic” decrees.
Sweden vs. Nordics
I don’t think extra commentary is necessary.
Sweden, the poster child for “coronaskepticism” amongst the Western countries, has had an order of magnitude more deaths than its Nordic neighbors and relatives.
Meanwhile, “herd immunity” is nowhere in sight (7.3% seroprevalence in Stockholm at end-April).
I don’t think you can ascribe the difference to plausible geographic/cultural factors. While Sweden may be more “central” than Norway or, especially, Finland – and the Finns are also famously solitary people, who “socially distance” by default – this does not apply to Denmark. The Danish population is much denser, and more than a third of it is concentrated in the Copenhagen metropolitan area, which hosts 2.1 million people – not that far off from Stockholm’s 2.4 million.
As Alexander Mercouris points out:
In Sweden the reputations of too many important people are bound up with the country’s mitigation strategy for it to be openly abandoned. However, restrictions have been quietly tightened throughout April.
This makes the discrepancy all the more glaring.
However, it is also important to note that Sweden’s approach enjoys broad-based support amongst its population.
Brazil vs. LatAms
Though eclipsed in parts by Ecuador – believed to be the epicenter of the epidemic in Latin America – Brazil has surged ahead and deaths have since outpaced even Ecuador and Peru.
Mexico, run by initially coronaskeptic AMLO, hasn’t done great either.
Argentina and Uruguay, which had both luck and locked down early, are successfully containing their epidemics at a low level.
Incidentally – like it or not, but it seems majority of Brazilians disapprove of Bolsonaro’s performance. His net approval rating fell from ~-5% in February to ~-15% now. As of the latest poll (XP/Ipespe, May 16–18, 2020), a net 37% of Brazilians are unhappy with his Corona response in particular. The coronaskeptics cannot claim that they have public opinion on their side, at least so far as Brazil is concerned.
Belarus vs. East Slavs
This is the one case that I am aware of in which there has been seemingly little difference in performance between countries, regardless of policy.
Amongst the three major Slavic countries of the former USSR, it was the Ukraine that had the hardest lockdown, while Belarus had no significant lockdown at all, with Russia intermediate between them. However, the Ukraine has consistently done very badly with testing, while both Russia and Belarus have done extensive testing; Russia’s numbers, in per capita terms, have always been comparable to those of the major West European countries.
UKROTRIUMPH. Contra my expectations at the start, it is in fact the Ukraine that has done better than either Russia or Belarus at suppressing deaths. It is perhaps my one Corona prediction that I got unequivocally wrong.
Now all else equal, Belarus was probably expected to do best by default. Minsk only has 2 million people, vs. 4 million in Kiev and up to 15 million in the Moscow metropolitan area. Though it now has (had) substantial numbers of Gastarbeiters in Western Europe, they were still 3-4x less prevalent than Ukrainians even in per capita terms, nor was there a ~70,000 strong community based specifically in Italy predominantly hailing from Ternopil oblast (which led to a localized but contained outbreak in that region).
Adjusting for Moscow, which officially accounts for more than half of Russia’s deaths (though very likely less in reality), and we see that Belarus’ figures are still essentially comparable to Russia’s.
Can we then say that Lukashenko, who refused to cancel in-person Easter services and the Victory Day parade, has been vindicated?
This certainly seems like one victory for the coronaskeptic camp, if the only one out of three.
However, against that, we need to point that just like with data from a certain number of predominantly southern Russian oblasts, where daily new cases have suspiciously clustered just below 100 for weeks on end (Lipetsk governor has even been recorded ordering subordinates to fiddle the numbers), the numbers from Belarus – which, unlike Russia, is an outright dictatorship, with no significant scope for investigative journalism – also raise questions.
The number of new cases in Belarus have, since the end of April, consistently clustered at just below 1,000 – almost as if the country was some crony-run Russian province in the boondocks, blown up tenfold. Are there any other countries with such remarkable, long-running day-to-day stability? Belarus does a lot of tests – as many as Russia in per capita terms, or at least it claims to – so this is presumably unlikely to arise as a result of testing constraints (as, for instance, happened during the first few weeks of the Wuhan epidemic). If you purposefully fiddle with case numbers, no reason to believe you’re not fiddling the deaths numbers either.
As I said above, I am not going to take away this “victory” from the coronaskeptics, in the absence of concrete evidence that Belarus’ numbers are fundamentally incorrect. But it is something to bear to mind.
For obvious reasons, it’s hard to impossible to gauge how happy Belorussians are with Lukashenko’s policies.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
IIRC I replied already, but as I said, while testing is low (and I’ve repeatedly said so, and criticized Ukraine for it), it is obviously possible to control Corona with low testing. It’s just harder and involves more economic costs, than if you can identify more carriers and send just them into isolation.
Low testing =/= concealing deaths. While Ukraine may be concealing and/or misattributing deaths, at any rate above typical world levels, that remains to be proven.
It is not the primary function of government to lock people in their homes and close their businesses in order to “safeguard” them from a disease that they could choose to “safeguard” themselves from anyway and for most people has a 99.9% chance of not killing them even if they catch it.
How can you even say that someone died from coronavirus, if you never tested for it? It seems pretty obvious that by eschewing testing Ukrainians are going to miss a lot cases, and by extension a lot of corona deaths.
Ukrainian “authorities” are not really concealing anything. They themselves have no idea how far the infection has spread. Major medical malpractice. Third-world stuff.
BTW, Anatoly. Do you have any explanation for deaths declining in Poland in recent days, despite their number of new cases holding steady since early April? I suspect some data fudging, perhaps a sudden switch to “German” method of classifying deaths. But muh authoritarian Belarus!
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Poland/0/2e098155cc65f0a5c8e336b5eb2fcd42042bb15d.png
Edited footage of a private meeting of Bolsonaro’s government on April 22, 2020
This footage was released a few days ago on the orders of the Supreme Court of Brazil
https://youtu.be/RsQHTYqyyXc
As New York Governor Cuomo constantly complained, it is the number of cases that require hospitalization that matters otherwise it’s “just the flu”. The Washington Post reported (FWIW) that in Brazil and Mexico the Wuhan flu is hitting younger people harder than in the developed world. If true this is an alarming trend both for medical and economic reasons. The economy doesn’t care if my 68 year old self gets sick and dies. In fact, the economy would benefit as my assets would pass to more robust economic hands but if people in their prime working years get sick ( the WaPo says a quarter of hospitalizations in Mexico are between 25 and 50 years old) then we can expect a global economic collapse.
The numbers of “daily deaths per day” is quite meaningless. It doesn’t take into account co-morbidities. We really don’t know how many people died specifically from the virus. We don’t know how many of these people would have died from something else. We don’t know how “counting deaths by cause” differs in each country. We really don’t know the rate of infection in a given population. We don’t really know the level of “herd immunity”. The only yardstick we “know” or can really judge by is total number of deaths from ALL CAUSES in a given year, and that will take some time to calculate. When we can calculate how many people died in the COVID year vs other years, then we will know the true “death rate”, and even that number will be eschewed because it will not take into account the deaths from stress and despair from the overblown panic which the virus, the “experts”, and the silly politicians has caused.
So Bolsonaro is saying what is important is God, family, country, and liberty. So he’s willing to fight the petty dictators, and demands the people have weapons to ensure that. Was I supposed to turn against him? I thought these were American values? At least the values I was taught.
Wait, that was supposed to hurt Bolsonaro’s image?
Those Supreme Court people must be even more out of touch than ours.
Actually, if it starts to kill young people, you’d see a far more effective reaction against it. It is not like, in this regard, the plague of the middle ages that it was beyond the knowledge and the means of society.
Mexico has a very high rate of obesity among young people (about twice the Western European rate). So does the USA, but in the USA the rate is higher among minorities.
Ukraine currently has tested 6,900 people per million. In Europe this is only higher than Albania (4,700) but in terms of other countries discussed in this post, it is higher than Ecuador (6,ooo), more than double the rate of Brazil (3,470) and Argentina (3,000) and triple the rate of Mexico (1,750).
Among highly developed countries, Japan and Taiwan have testing rates comparable to those in Brazil:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
“Coronaskeptic” is a stupid way of saying “lockdown skeptic.”
It’s late May in a part of the country with very low case numbers, a place where the “curve” flattened over a month ago, and I’m still not allowed to attend religious services.
Those who are attempting to focus on this as a worldwide phenomenon seem almost bound to neglect the details of the lockdown in a country like America, where the lockdown varies from state to state. We have 50 of them, you know. And several of them have acted arbitrarily and without any publicly-proffered reason whatsoever.
Finally, apparently no one, not even on Unz, has bothered to look into the 2006 Bush administration decisions that led us to this point.
Cases go up with better testing, even as deaths may be dropping…
We aren’t following the Chinese lead, by the way. The people saying that are incorrect. We are generally following the lead of an idea that was conceived in the bowels of bureaucracy over a decade ago.
The other thing is, people outside white America have no idea how much “small businesses” mean to us. I can tell that’s it just a cliche to many if not most of you.
I agree that normies have stupid responses to the destruction of our way of life. But they’re normies; it’s to be expected that they’ll have stupid responses. They don’t know any better. That doesn’t excuse the powers that be from destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people while allowing their larger competitors to continue operations.
And when will the likes of Andrew Cuomo answer for their hideous and evil policy of inserting Corona patients into nursing homes?
One confound to rule them all,
One confound to find them,
One confound to bring them all,
And in the darkness bind them.
Scandinavian edition:
country … % non-white … Covid deaths/mil.
Sweden ………. 30 …………. 399
Denmark …….. 12 …………… 97
Norway ………… 8 …………… 43
Finland ………… 5 …………… 56
(I could have titled this, “Swedish Exceptionalism in One Table”.)
The slavic countries have about the same level of deaths per million as Denmark, Finland, Norway, Columbia, Argentina and Uruguay, including Russia. I do not expect that Russia will hit anywhere near Sweden levels.
As for what’s causing the difference I don’t know. You can find the same disparities solely among countries that locked down.
As for Belarus, that flatness looks pretty normal to me. If it starts going down soon I would say it’s legit.
One suggestion to look at – immigration, international business and tourism. How much immigration do these countries have relative to one another? Also, how has their banning of immigration and quarantine of travelers been, and how has their quarantine of sick people been relative to one another?
I would bet you’d see way more correlation between quarantining sick people and deaths per million than you get with trying to quarantine the healthy with lockdowns. A lot of places that have gone nuts with trying to lock down and quarantine healthy people have done jack to quarantine actual sick people (like sending sick people to nursing homes).
None of the lockdown govts “flattened the curve” they “CRUSHED” the world economy! No excuse for putting billions at risk of economic strife, food shortages, a mariad of health / death problems that are side effects of the so called “cure” to save a few hundred thousand or even a few million in productive ppl who are already living on borrowed time due to modern medicine, and even those that died already had a foot in deaths for that matter! Analyze stats till the second comming of Christ, second guess until the four horseman of the apacolypes come thundering down upon us. There are no valid excuses for destroying the planet to try and stop the unstoppable! And there will be another virus and another and on and on into perpetuity because that’s the way it’s always been and always will be! Now suddenly the flu season who everyone knows is coming every year and no one ever gave two fucks about is going to create chaos, because the neurotic modern human state of mind is an uncurable disease more dangerous than any virus Lex Luthor can whip up in any lab!
Lies, damned lies and statistics. Can anyone sincerely say that they will not use whatever stats prove their point and then ignore those that don’t?
If corona-chan could somehow uncuck Swedes from their establishment, that might be its ultimate and most miraculous achievement of all.
Obesity is actually more common among older adults due to people getting more sedentary with age but many obese people don’t live to be really old so obesity is generally most common from age 40 to 70.
Much too early to draw any conclusions, as real epidemiologists, not wannabe pretenders like AK, have warned all along. We won’t know the final score card until late 2021 at the earliest, when a vaccine is realistically available and fully distributed (the latter point is often ignored).
Excess deaths is the cleanest and best measure. Reported per capita deaths rates are a lot less valuable because there are a lot of questions raised about how well countries record their deaths. If one cannot do a comparison with excess deaths then any comparison is essentially worthless. And again, we need to compare excess deaths when the epidemic is over.
The Swedish study was done in late April but the infections had actually happened in mid-April, because it takes a minimum of ~2 weeks before you get serious symptoms. This would assume 1 week of asymptomatic spreading, but if those who have argued for a much longer incubation period are correct then the date would have to be pushed back even further, which would imply an even higher herd immunity now. Nevertheless, using the more conservative 1 week asymptomatic spread as baseline, the 7% number would be a mid-April number. Modeling on that number would still put immunity at around 20% for late May given trends thus far. This is not as good as the initial model, which put it at 26% for late April, but still substantial.
There is also the theory that we may be seeing herd immunity effects kicking in at lower levels than the previously mentioned 60%. It’s been a the fringes of the debate but deserves to be taken seriously.
Some good news: there doesn’t seem to be major mutations which would impede a vaccine’s efficiacy. There is also confirmed T-cell antibody immunity, which is good, because there were some concerns about re-infections early on. This would also mean that any vaccine would be more robust.
This picture is obviously unreliable – in Russia, the method of counting deaths from coronavirus gives unreliable figures, in Ukraine, a small number of tests makes reliable counting of victims impossible
In all European countries the overwhelming majority of deaths have been the elderly in nursing homes. Sweden is no exception. This is more bean counting than the actual causes of death. My recoolection is that Sweden was using the WHO method of counting deaths, which would include terminally ill patients who contracted the virus.
No idea about the WHO method, but the Swedish one is that anyone who dies after testing positive for the coronavirus counts as a “corona death” — no matter the actual cause of death.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utbrott/aktuella-utbrott/covid-19/bekraftade-fall-i-sverige/
Herd immunity threshold depends on the “basic reproduction number” of the virus in normal conditions.
Although, of course, even for the same virus, there is no constant default infection rate of the virus across different places and societies, as well as different seasons of the year.
If the rate of infection is just above 1.1, then threshold for herd immunity can be around 9.1% of people to be immune. (A recent study claims that 17% of people in London have exposure to the virus, which would be sufficient to provide herd immunity for a virus with basic number of reproduction at 1.2)
So in such a borderline scenario where rate of infection is only just above 1 (which can be relevant at the moment, with summer weather and people social distancing), then the current amount of immunity might be sufficient.
Of course, concepts like “herd immunity” and “basic reproduction number” are fictional concepts, rather than actual features of biological world. To some extent, they are obviously very useful for making people to think more clearly about the topic. But in the current situation, they seem to become more like mythology or idée fixe, to justify the behaviour of the authorities.
This is an edited fragment. The video is a trainwreck where, amongst other things, he basically admits he is sacking the regional commander of the Federal Police to protect his family and friends. Of course there is a part of the brazilian society that will defend Bolsonaro even if he spanks his own mother, and this video will appeal to this core support, but it will not help him get new support.
It would also be ideal to provide graphs for the Donbas and Transdniestria
There is a lot of disagreement between what I’ve seen written on this subject, but I think the general idea is that you get symptoms an average of 2 days after contracting the virus (not 2 weeks) and that the virus is usually over about 10-12 days after you get symptoms.
I don’t know where you get a minimum of 2 weeks.
I think a number of places are already there, whatever the number of actually infected was. If there is never any second wave (especially in places that are opening without completely finishing the first) I think that settles it.
A couple of points about Sweden.
a) You left out the point that Sweden’s neighbors have all moved radically towards the Swedish policy. The movement of Finland, Norway, Denmark towards less restrictionist policy is much greater than Sweden’s move towards more. Our politicians have had long meetings, consultations with experts and they’ve thought about their career futures so their endorsement of a modified Swedish model and the abandonment of the lockdown speaks volumes. (Most likely they’ve calculated that they can simply add extra protections to elderly to avoid the death count and then Sweden’s model becomes perfect.)
b) The epidemic in Norway and especially Finland mainly spread through Sweden so it’s at a later stage. This may have an effect on final death toll that has nothing to do with policy (summer may or may not suppress the epidemic and if so it suppresses a different phase etc).
c) The assumption that “Nordic neighbors” have similar population structures is not good. Sweden avoided WWII, Finland was hit much worse than Norway and Denmark, and Finland remained poor for decades after the war. There was a huge movement of Finns to Sweden up to the 1970s so a lot of Finns moved to Sweden. A lot of ethnic Finnish elderly live in Swedish care homes because their working career was in Sweden so their retirement package is Sweden’s as well. Ethnic Finns are overrepresented in deaths in Sweden so Finland’s elderly are dying in Sweden and this inflates Sweden’s numbers and depresses Finland’s numbers. (I’ll look into this with data once I have time.)
d) We are not using the same classification of corona deaths so there may be big artificial differences in whether or not some very old person died with corona was counted as a corona death. The good news is that given the culture we will likely eventually have our health officials study the matter without an agenda and produce an honest comparison, the bad news is right now it’s too politically risky for the governments in power so we will have to wait a few years.
This is all an act, though only to impress his own team, and he got lucky politically (and unlucky judicially) that it became public. Early on in the pandemic, he was vividly interested in using the health crisis as justification to decree a State of Siege. That didn’t prove feasible, so he assumed the persona of ‘defender of freedom’. He is a great actor.
I want to know how he can get away with the fact that there are no black or mullato people in that meeting, not even some token types like they do in America. How does the non white population (the majority) process this fact?
Again, another writer here neglecting the fact that Uruguay did not institute a mandtory lockdown. Schools and public spectacles were ordered closed, but that’s it. Everything else out of the government were polite requests to close and #QuedateEnCasa, and notably the police had their hands tied and were powerless to do anything other than politely request people not form big groups.
Early in the crisis there were panicked calls for a mandatory Quarantine, but President Luis Lacalle Pou rightly resisted them. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Uruguayos treated the polite requests of the Government with great gravity does not turn these polite requests into a mandatory “lockdown” after the fact.
Argentina on the other hand is likely to see its mandatory quarantine renewed by Fernandez 2 weeks at a time all the way until their next elections. Argentina’s default this past Friday may not have been very surprising, but their foreign currency reserves are getting critically low. Fernandez has accelerated Argentina’s slide into Venezuela style poverty without Venezuela’s prudent expenditures in foreign arms and training.
Please stop with this “Argentina and Uruguay both locked down” nonsense. The actual reality on the ground in the two countries couldn’t be any more different aside from putting more or less effective controls along the border with Brasil.
Yeah I find it odd how 80%+ mulatto and black Brazil seems perfectly happy with an almost entirely white government. The Brazilian government looks whiter than the current British government and there’s plenty of malcontents in Britain who would say the government is STILL too white.
I assume it has a lot to do with Catholicism and the idea of shared culture and language being a much more important unifying factor than biological race?
“Please stop with this “Argentina and Uruguay both locked down” nonsense.” – You meant please stop putting Urugway and Argentina in one sentence or appearing on the same page in any book.
Uruguay is Argentina’s Belarus.
Well, I will try to answer that question. The reaction to that lack of diversity can be perceived in many ways in a country like Brazil. First off, although those people in that meeting are admittedly ‘white’ in terms of Brazil, I doubt that in some more racially homogeneous country they would be considered white. The vice-president himself defines himself as a Brazilian Indian, although this is a bit like what Elizabeth Warren did in the U.S.: he is actually of mixed-race ancestry, some of which is Brazilian Indian. That being said, the view in Brazil among many people is that these issues of representativity are racist; that’s the opposite of what you see in the U.S.. In Brazil, it is commonly thought (but not as commonly practiced) that people should be nominated for a position based on their merit alone.
There is however a minority view, coming from the left, that aligns with the American ‘liberal’ view. This is not something which reflects significantly in their voters’ concerns, however; that’s why it is not insisted upon enormously. Perhaps that is gradually changing. Media in Brazil is becoming closer to the European and American model. Representativity concerns are visible, at least in the hegemonic media. Some soap operas and news shows nowadays make a visible effort to include a multiracial array of actors.
But what is really frowned upon in Brazil is explicit racism, in discourse or in actions. Insults referencing a person’s race, or barring someone from a place because of race, are not tolerated either by our culture or by our law, although one sees it happen in specific places from time to time. According to some people, the rise of Bolsonaro has triggered an increase in such incidents, but I don’t see any possibility of it becoming normalized, ever.
I’ll take the liberty of answering for him. He meant that it takes two weeks or more from the onset of infection for the body to produce enough antibodies that they are detectable by the commonest tests and that those who tested positive in the week of April 27 must therefore have been infected on April 19 at the latest. This I believe is not a controversial view. A more heated topic is whether someone can catch and get immune to SARS-CoV-2 without producing enough antibodies to test positive for them. Some well-respected scientists think so; others don’t.
Yes, but the argument Thulean Friend is referring to is precisely that we should reconsider some of our assumptions about how viruses are spread and populations get immune to them.
I posted a link to the paper in question two weeks ago:
Never.
“Yes, there are a lot of confounds.” – Population density explains 50% of variance among 26 European countries not including four outliers: Sweden, Ireland, France and Belgium. Sweden is an outlier because of lax counter measures.
The effective population density could explain more than 50% and probably explain France and Ireland. Each virus fatality can be assigned population density of one square km he/she lived/worked/died and then the average for all fatalities would be the effective (disease specific) population density (EPD).
Other confounding variable is age demographic. IFR is exponential function of age. The value of IFR doubles every 5-7 years of age. Each country could be assigned an expected IFR0 value for uniform (age independent) infection rate. Then this IFR, imo, would reduce the variance by about 10%.
We can explain about 50% of variance with effective (disease specific) population density (EPD) and 10% with expected IFR0. The remaining unexplained 40% variance could be attributed to: (1) severity of countermeasures (2) medical system differences and (3) data reporting errors including cheating and lying.
It is likely that a large number of people in their prime working years — like me — have already had this virus and recovered without the need for hospitalization (very often without the need to even see a doctor).
No economic crisis resulted, or would have resulted absent the police-state lockdown, for a simple reason: for the solid majority of all people, and almost all prime-working-age people, this is merely a flu, maybe worse than most flus but perhaps not even that.
Even according to the dishonest and unreliable government / hospital statistics, the people who allegedly died “from” this virus have been predominantly people with serious comorbidity, usually more than one: over 70 plus a preexisting respiratory problems like COPD, a long history of smoking tobacco, morbid obesity, diabetes, uncontrolled or poorly treated high BP. (Caveats: it appears that lisinopril and similar BP-lowering medications may make it harder to fight off the virus.)
Scientifically, there was and still is no basis for restrictions on the liberty of the majority of people, who do not fall into these categories.
Morally and practically, there is no justification for the lockdowns or the normal-life-destroying mandatory distancing of all of us, nor even the crushing isolation of old people either.
People have a right to take risks with their own lives, as they are allowed to do all the time. Those risks have been deliberately exaggerated as a pretext to grab more free money and take away more liberty. And they have a right to visit their families and engage in a (semi-)free person’s life as we did before the “pandemic.”
I guess this is because most Brazilians see themselves as being part of the same Catholic, Brazilian culture regardless of race, whereas in countries like the US and UK the different ethnic groups exist more as parallel communities and generally see themselves as competitors and victims of whites, not as part of the same group.
So wou wave the other outliers away with confounding factors like data reporting errors, who is to say that the same doesn’t apply to Sweden? You make no examination of factors in this case because you just want support for you lockdown crusade.
Essentially all deaths in Sweden are in nursing homes and the dead are elderly. It seems to me like all the explosions of deaths are in care homes, terminal care units and so on, with no country on earth experiencing any mass death of healthy non-elderly people. This suggests that all other policies are actually irrelevant to death toll and it all depends on how the care homes are operated in each country.
One thing that’s relevant is that in Sweden nursing homes are giant institutions with huge numbers of people (relatively speaking) and they’ve been often used as a jobs program for migrants with low language skills and probably low IQ as well. In Finland that hasn’t happened yet but I’m definitely looking at options to escape this country before I’m old and frail as I think we will be in the same situation in a few decades.
We closed schools, restaurants, put roadblocks on the street… how did any of that protect people in nursing homes? How would Sweden’s nursing homes done any better if they had done the same?
Brazilian here.
People don’t tend to judge others by race here. Brazil is massively mixed, and everyone has white, black and indigenous ancestors, so there can be no blaming on one another. Racemixing is seen as a non-issue here.
That said, there are unmixed populations left in this country. Real whites are the vast majority in the South, and a small majority in the Southeast, racism happens here, mostly hidden. The Northeast has the most unadmixed Blacks, the North has many unadimexed Indigenous. The Center-West has been colonized from all other regions, but it’s mostly born out of the labor of White Southern settlers.
And although racemixing is seen as the most normal thing in the world, there IS discomfort in legacy white families with it, not being something desirable, even though accepted and unquestioned.
Differences in outcomes, the “Left” standards, and all that, are all blamed on social and economic inequality. Race wasn’t ever an issue until our Millennial Left started learning it from the Anglosphere, and now it’s a thing among the youth.
About the whole Catholic thing: You’re wrong, nobody gives a shit about religious divides here, nor observe traditions about that, concepts, culture, whatever. Religious people just believe in God, there’s no denomination wars, perceived differences in behavior among groups, etc
About people seeing each other as part of one culture: also wrong. Brazilians are very aware of their cultural differences. VERY. But people don’t care about that as well, they accept each other’s cultures (except the Rio de Janeiro one, which is vastly looked upon as scum, even though it’s lauded by the media as the Standard Culture, which of course it’s not).
Ethnic groups tend to think of themselves as different people as well, but this distinction tends to dissolve with 2 generations. We have every ethnic enclave you may imagine: Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Jews, Germans, Lithuanians, Russians, Italians, French, Americans, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese….
But apart from the Asian ones (their physical appearance glues them together with one another), every single group is losing their identity, marrying out of the group, and becoming just another faceless Brazilian.
The Bolsonaro phenomenon wasn’t Racial or Cultural, by the way. It was a reaction against corruption. He’s a former Captain of the Army, and had all of the “We’re going to jail all these motherfucking Thieves!” rhetoric. He’s unfortunately very liberal economically, but that’s not why the people voted for him, and they couldn’t care less, as 99% of the population doesn’t know anything about economics. He’s a “Capitalist”, contrary to those “Communists” from the previous government (Keynesians).
That’s it, I think.
Believe it, or not, 53% of U.S. patients die within 6 months of nursing home admission.
https://www.geripal.org/2010/08/length-of-stay-in-nursing-homes-at-end.html
The top-line number of Covid “deaths” (80-100K in the U.S.) is actually not all that impressive to begin with. (Using a much tighter definition of causation, the 2017 flu racked up 60,000 dead.) But a much better statistic for tracking the true cost of the virus would be statistical Years of Life Lost (“YLL”), which measures recorded deaths against the victim’s remaining years of life expectancy.
When you consider that the mean age of a U.S. Covid victim is about 80, the true “loss of life” drops precipitously. And when you further consider that it is the unhealthiest of 80 year-olds — i.e., those with comorbidities in nursing homes — the real loss of life starts to seem almost trivial from a macro public health point of view.
In fact, THE defining characteristic of the Wu-Flu is that it’s a little bit better than the regular flu at tipping nearly dead people over the edge. But for everyone else, it’s only about as lethal as the 2017 seasonal flu that no one paid any attention to.
“Herd immunity “ may be all well and good in wild populations but it is a useless concept for agricultural or human production systems. Crop,meat or industrial production cannot work where large numbers of the producers are sick
Unfortunately, excess deaths are now going to be an admixture of deaths caused by the actual virus, and deaths caused by the counter-measures against the virus. These effects could probably be disaggregated with some random sampling of death reports. But the authorities and experts have so far been loath to pull back the curtain with any factual investigation of actual cause of death.
Belarus played it pretty smart – no lockdowns, but closed borders. Prevent it from getting in at all
I looked at variance in data of 30 Euroepan countries and I found that Sweden is the egregious outlier. Your objection about nursing homes is just hand waving copout. Compare nursing homes deaths in other countries and what percent of people live in nursing home then perhaps you could make some quantitative and not a hand waving argument , but you won’t because you are lazy and probably drunk. Then even if indeed Sweden had worse nursing homes deaths record than other countries then the question must be asked if it is because Sweden across the board screwed up while the countries that put at the centre or their policy the protection of human lives managed to protect nursing homes better than Sweden. The fate of nursing home patients in Sweden was sealed once Sweden decided to do nothing. Character is the destiny. That’s what being callous brings.
I am puzzled why do you even make the argument and try to excuse Sweden. You do not care how many old people die. 1,000 or 10,000 you do not care. They are old and death is all they have coming to them.
Only a dipshit would argue that the role of the government does not include the control of a pandemic. Moreover only a troll would then pull a bullshit mortality statistic from out of his ass.
This is why Ukraine is doing so well.
Woman strips off and puts her knickers over her face after Ukrainian shop worker refused to serve her without a mask on
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8358613/Woman-puts-knickers-face-shes-asked-wear-face-mask-Ukraine.html
Most people are below 50 and are not otherwise ill.
Also, there has never been a moment in human history when there weren’t many, many pandemics….you abject clown.
I only read the abstract, but surely it looks they are juggling around words, rather than discovering that “disease-induced immunity is stronger than when immunity is uniformly distributed in the community as in the classical herd immunity level”.
By which I mean – it just re-states what I wrote above: “for the same virus, there is no constant default infection rate of the virus across different places and societies, as well as different seasons of the year.”
To explain myself – they presumably (without reading the paper) notice that the basic reproduction number is an average of a population, and this does not specify whether actual infectivity is variable or homogeneous in the population that produced the basic reproduction number. In addition, they can notice people with higher rates of infectivity may be on average infected (and therefore immunized) earlier, than people with lower infectivity.
However, this issue is already included when you assume that there is no default basic reproduction number.
So we might have a population with 99 “normal people” for which the virus will have a “default” basic reproduction number of 1.5, and one “superspreader” for which the virus will have a default basic reproduction number of 11.5.
So including the superspreader, the herd immunity level of these 100 people will be at 37,5%. However, after that one superspreader is immunized, then the herd immunity threshold level falls to 33.3%
Perhaps the superspreaders have a higher chance to be infected earlier, so then they can calculate using the basic reproduction number that would be minus a higher proportion of those superspreaders – this number will be lower than when those superspreaders are included.
Is this an “discovery” about a problem in classical herd immunity level? Well, only if you had believed there is a “default” basic reproduction number. Otherwise, it is a sophistry of juggling around words, for saying what we already assumed: the “default” basic reproduction number isn’t constant in different populations and times.
Oh no, I’ve been found out.
In contrast to this happy, utopian racism-free Brazil, however, – we can notice that it is a very economically unequal country, according to the indicators.
So people will still be more divided according to their economic situation than even the world average.
Brazil’s wealthy rulers benefit from the “colonialism with an anti-racist face” style of marketing?
The latter is cheaper to comply with. So if Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, hire a few African American bankers, and put them in prominent places and brochures, – then they can claim they are “supporters of equality”, rather than having to actually support equality, which would be quite more expensive and painful for their accountants.
Brazilian middle class is probably not large enough to have this: some middle class “IQ supporters” to claim that a greater proportion of the lower classes (who are composed by a lot of African Americans and Latins) are irrevocably (genetically) never able to do the middle class administrative office cattle job, that is at best what an “IQ test” in their current design, is measuring your ability to do.
I’m not sure about that. I think IgM antibodies should be detectable just a few days after infections, while IgG antibodies should be detectable 10-14 days after infection – and maybe even a little earlier.
From what I’ve read the Swedish serology assays measured both IgG and IgM as well as IgA antibodies. But it is possible they needed very large quantities of antibodies. I guess it depends on the the test method used by the Swedish lab.
Yes, you’re right.
Brazil’s median IQ is 87, but it’s certainly not a single bell curve, but many, and simplifying it:
Whites and Excel Minorities ~100
Everyone else ~70
You have a permanent overclass and underclass, permanent war-zone crime, low-to-zero trust, corruption and very low scientific achievement.
This country wouldn’t survive on its own means and technology (today), the future is absolutely the return of a Feudal Society based on large land owners of the countryside, while the cities rot.
Maybe yes with our demographics of our Golden Age of development (1910~1960) we could have been something great, but not today – demographics are permanently screwed.
The Left uses an eternal War On Poverty trope to grow in power and guilt-trip voters as well, even though they’ll never succeed.
But I love this country, and why, do you ask? Because, like every 3rd world country, it has absolute and real freedom, simply because the state isn’t capable to overreach into your private realm, but it’s not like those hellholes of Africa and Asia, we do have some manners and civilization.
But still, there’s no surveillance, the police is a joke, piracy is rampant, land is vast and cheap, nothing goes punished, etc
A quasi-libertarian dreamland, mainly because it’s dysfunctional. We pay heavy taxes for this shitty-level of government, by the way, which is a downside.
I’ve been to Europe many times, and although I have to BOW to the achievements of the continent, they are unfortunately in the past.
I was in Italy in January, and let me tell you: The place is GORGEOUS. Florence is the prettiest place I’ve ever been in my life.
But…
The Cities were ghost towns filled with tourists, like a Disney attraction. I barely saw Italians, and Asian tourists (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) were EVERYWHERE. Rome was plagued with immigrants, and so was Milan.
The Italians themselves lived in suburb apartments, humiliated, paying rents instead of owning their own houses, or living pay by pay with the minimum, in a state of permanent low-middle-class, with no hope of ascending or having anything great.
Sure, a local said to me: “There’s no poverty here” (I doubted) “But you don’t see many rich people, do you?”, “We’re all trapped”.
Every time I return to Brazil, I feel liking it better, simply because it’s still free and full of space.
Mr. Karlin, a couple of points on Brazil:
1) Most of Brazil is under lockdown, Bolsonaro notwithstanding. There lockdowns are blatantly, in-your-face illegal and unconstitutional, but that’s how it goes and Bolsonaro has refrained from enforcing the central governments prerogatives. How far it is being respected varies, from ~70% in the center-south to no more than ~50% in the north and northeast. The numbers have been slipping too, since the economic toll has been enormous. Brazil wasn’t all that well after being looted by the former leftist governments for 16 years, and now an additional 10 million formal jobs have been lost and some 38 million informal sector workers have seen their income drop by an average of 70%. All these people are being kept alive by temporary “coronavouchers” of ~ USD 150 a month per head being distributed by the federal government. Most of the major cities have seen protests against the lockdowns, nothing so severe yet, but the restlessness is increasing.
2) Most numbers not only for Brazil but for most of Latin America are bunk because none of these countries are testing. Only people who get bad enough to go into a hospital are counted. By the way, the health system in Brazil has not been overwhelmed, although the severity of the pressure varies. One city, Manaus in the extreme north, it was overwhelmed for some two weeks back in April; a few others came close (note we’re talking about at most some ~2% of the national population in these areas). In the South, hospitals are closing and laying off staff because they’re losing money, since the coronavirus patients have not materialized and the others are staying the hell away.
3) A recent survey by a university on ninety of Brazil’s major cities concluded that these cities alone have had some 760,000 covid cases (the official number for them is around 100,000). The population who tested positive for antibodies goes from a high of ~20% in some northern cities to less than ~1% all over the South. This would put the death rate of covid in Brazil at under 0.5%. Do a google translate on this if you’re interested in more information: http://epidemio-ufpel.org.br/uploads/downloads/276e0cffc2783c68f57b70920fd2acfb.pdf .
In connection with the discussion on Sweden, who can say what benefits the Swedish economy has gained in comparison with Norway, Denmark, etc.?
Others have already answered you on the question of “what race means in Brazil”, so I’ll just correct your numbers. Brazil ain’t “80% mulatto and black”; the correct number is ~ 50% according to the census. That means there are some 110 million whites in Brazil.
OK, a great many of these whites won’t be considered “white” in Anglosaxonia. Fair enough. If you cut out 75% of them as “not really white”, you’re still left with a little less than 30 million people. How many European countries have populations of over 30 million?
Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, once guesstimated that Brazil’s smart fraction should be around the same size as Germany’s – in absolute numbers, of course. That’s more than enough people to run a country. Brazil does need to do a far better job of finding them and putting their talents to use, though.
“deaths declining in Poland in recent days, despite their number of new cases holding steady”
I wouldn’t put data fudging beyond the current government but I don’t think they could get away with it (among other things it would require cooperation from the healthcare sector which hates them).
At present the confirmed cases to fatality rate is around 4 % which suggests that at least half of infected cases haven’t been discovered yet (testing has been pretty limited to suspected cases and contact tracing). The great majority of cases being discovered are either asymptomatic or don’t require hospitalization. You’d never know this from the media which wrings what drama it can from 300 new cases! (over 80 % asymptomatic and most of the rest very mild).
At present the hospitalization rate has also been declining from around 2500 a week or so ago to 2200 now (from a peak of just over 3000 in late April). Unscientifically I think that’s a good thing to measure (especially in a hypochondriac culture like Poland where there’s little cultural support for riding it out at home).
A friend of a friend works in the unit dedicated to coronavirus cases for the region (of around 3.5 million people) and they say they’ve never been close to overwhelmed.
The population were done with caring about coronavirus about two weeks ago and loosening regulations are less what the government is comfortable with and more about trying to appear that they’re in control of the situation. “Don’t go to parks…. well go to parks but maintain dist…. ah whatever, go to the park….”
Agreed. To a sane person it’s one of the core functions of government. If a government can’t at least do that you’d have to question whether it’s worth having a government.
A libertarian would disagree but I’m talking about sane people here.
I read somewhere that all its neighbours closed their borders, so it was of little significance whether or not Belarus closed its borders too. And Belarus is completely landlocked.
Also ignores Arkansas. Can I link to the Stormer here? Probably not. Anyway, Arkansas – no lockdown, way under fatality rate of surrounding States. I think like 35 people in total. Compared to Mississippi’s apocalyptic 200.
But whatever. If it save one more babushka, just one more precious grechka-munching Soviet crone wearing a winter coat in summer, and above all prove that China is god, it was all worth it.
Does this include somebody with Covid symptoms who was self isolating At home and was crushed to death by their toilet paper hoard falling on top of them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPe0d4Zl6GA
Sort of. It’s true that the idea that Brazil has less racial conflict because of “Catholic culture” is wrong, especially because most of the poor now are not Catholic, but Evangelical; but it is not true that there are not some small religious division between Catholics and Evangelicals; only that, those differences are so mixed with racial and class differences (Catholicism is more white middle class, Evangelicals more mixed poor) that it is hard to separate one thing from the other. But occasionally conflicts arise, although less between Catholics and Evangelicals and more between Evangelicals and practitioners of Umbanda, etc.
Yes, except that, there are still some ethnic enclaves not fully mixed. i.e. Germans in some small towns (Italians less so, they seem to have mixed more with other whites), also Jews, even though mixing, keep their separate culture and religion. Three of the richest people in Brazil are Jews, by the way. Also, the mixing is not uniform: Europeans such as Portuguese, Spanish, Germans, Italians, Poles, etc, tend to mix more among themselves or with low-mixed-race types, while browns mix mostly with browns. Again, this could be a result for of class and the people that frequent the places you go, than of racism or any racial ideology of “purity”.
I don’t think people in Brazil (or in most of Latin America) vote in racial identity terms the way they vote in the US, maybe it’s more an Anglo thing. People identify with Bolsonaro mostly because of the fight against corruption and a vague “family values” discourse.
His government however seems to be pretty chaotic, with changes in ministers happening seemingly every week. Also, it is true that his Economy minister (Guedes) is extremely neo-liberal and is likely to cause the widening of the social gap, ending benefits for the poor or even for small businesses, and promoting large business and bankers.
Bottom line is all the forecasts by the doomsters have been not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. IFR is at the bottom of the range, it is less contagious than once thought, only care homes and hospitals needed extra measures, everything else was a spectacular own goal.
I changed my mind on this virus months ago as better data came in, I am still puzzled why others haven’t changed their minds, indeed doubling down on their folly, and why this includes so many politicians and media types.
It’s all a game to get Trump now. Dems want to implode the economy as much as possible in a last-ditch effort to get Orange Man. I think it will backfire spectacularly, just all the rest of the seditious conspiracies to get Trump.
The fact that different classes have easily identifiable racial makeups proves that this is a racial phenomena. I think this bogus Brazilian argument that race plays no role in society is an attempt to hide your true racial views. I highly doubt that lighter skinned want to hang out on beaches with darker skinned types, same for malls and housing, and that has nothing to do with “class” but race. White flight very clearly occurs in Brazil, to say its because of class is total dishonesty.
The huge flaw lies in your assumption that testing works. You are no doubt aware that the inventor of the RT-PCR test (and Nobel Prize winner) Kary Mullis consistently argued that the test should not be used to detect infectious disease.
Germany is also a federal state with different rules for each state. It seems that in one of them religious services are already allowed. The result came promptly: more than 130 infected people after the first gathering (in German):
https://www.fr.de/frankfurt/frankfurt-am-main-ort28687/frankfurt-corona-coronavirus-infektionen-baptisten-gottesdienst-zr-13773287.html
Sounds a very toxic environment to me. Brazil has all the high crime racial problems of a country like say South Africa, but even the few remaining white Brazilians are so brainwashed by the “raceless” rhetoric that they continue to mix themselves out of existence, because “We’re all Brazilians”.
At least in “racist” South Africa most whites are racially aware enough that they only mix with each other and remain in their own communities, white Brazilians are apparently too brainwashed by raceless Marxist “values” to do this.
Clear case of the rona. 🙂
Pot calling the kettle black? Troll!
Putin tells Shoigu that this year’s Victory Day parade will be held after all, but now on June 24th (the date of the victory parade of 1945):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otLpu_9qMDE
Watching this clip, I couldn’t help finding Putin’s words about the contagion risks a bit perfunctory, as if he changed his mind about the virus partway through and now has to go through the motions to defend his earlier strategy. What do Russians think? Is Putin a coronaskeptic or a lockdowner at heart?
He’s definitely a lockdowner. Maybe he will change his views in the future, but for now he is a consistent lockdowner
It is probably considered quite a desirable situation, for the lifestyle of the elite of Brazil, in their current configuration? Although an extreme example as a former slave colony, Brazil in the above sense is not different from most – whether republics, monarchies, dictatorships, and even some democracies – of either modern and ancient history.
I don’t think Italians have too bad lifestyle, by international standards – I mean who do you compare them to?
And the money of the Asian tourists (who are often working far more stressful hours at home) that Italians are often scamming with inflated prices, is going to their wallets, and providing many of them with a relatively lazy source of income.
I’m no expert – as with no experience with this kind of job -, but I always have an impression that earning money from tourism, can provide for a significant proportion of the workers a more enjoyable and relaxing than to work in a normal office job.
Imagine how many in countries like Brazil and Russia, would dream to be able to “work only half a year”, as certain Spanish/Italian/Greek tourist cities are infamous for.
IQ “test scores” are more a product of certain types of industrialization, than some cause of it. (Flynn effect ).
That’s not to say, that we can exclude that there might be potential for wildly different innate differences in average potential of academic achievement between different groups.
From the course of world history, it seems likely different nationalities have some widely different distribution of those not yet identified genes in the populations, which are conducive for academic achievements.
But these are not going to be recorded in some accurate way to the “IQ test” in its current form. Simply looking at a recent history of different nationalities would probably be the most accurate way to predict what you think the academic future of these nationalities will be.
And then, not all economic development is driven by technological/academic achievement – and the situation is even less with “catch-up countries” (for example, recent economic growth in China has been driven by importing technology, rather original development of it; while in Russia, there has been economic development continuing despite the academic decline of recent decades).
I think Putin follows recommendations of epidemiologists, both in the Russia and also of the WHO. Or perhaps balance between epidemiologists and economists. He is technocratic with this topic, where he does not feel an expert.
For example, the timing of the lockdown succeeded to push the epidemic peak into summer. This is some epidemiologists in the Ministry of Health (in Russia), were saying would be a good idea in March.
The difference from the epidemiologists’ professional advice has just been with the mask regime (epidemiologists and WHO were mainly saying they didn’t think medical masks will be very effective), and this mask regime idea was delegated to governors and mayors.
I have not been in Brazil, but was told by Brazilian people,- that the worst thing is a lack of public transport between cities.
So, if I remember, they are saying “Brazil should be paradise, but it is really difficult to move between cities, there is lack of public transport infrastructure, no high-speed trains, bus is taking for hours, you cannot explore all the beauty of the country easily, etc”.
Here is something similar to the main problems in the USA, with its “private wealth and public squalor”, most notably in inadequate development of public transport.
In either country, they would have benefited from even just a more Soviet style of development in this area (not to say they could aspire to a Japanese or Western European level of such infrastructure).
Americans often openly say “racist” views, while Brazilians usually openly say “anti-racist” views; but the real result looks presumably quite the same.
I don’t know if it is a representative sample, but when I looked at Brazilian bourgeoisie on YouTube a while ago, they all look like all Latino race (maybe with some Indian heritage), with African origin people as uncommon and excluded as in the American bourgeoisie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swfmR6wCBvc
Outwardly, I’m sure, but is this what Putin truly believes now, in late May, when the data is in from Belarus, Finland, and other neighbors?
This is my view too, and I liked that analogy you did the other day between Putin and Merkel — that far from being extremists, they are in fact Europe’s foremost centrists, only that Russian centrism is far removed from German centrism.
We won’t know then. The illness is so amorphous that it’s hard to get any solid bearing on anything.
Once the vaccine is released CV deaths will just be attributed to other things because having had the
vaccine “rules out” having had CV.
The safety history on rushed vaccines is very bad. It’s best to let vaccines mature in the full population for a few years. Let other people take them first.
You greatly overestimate my acquaintance with Putin. I don’t know what Putin thinks. But I don’t know a single Russian politician – covidskeptic. And the all-knowing Yandex can’t find such politicians. Among Russian celebrities, I don’t know covidskeptics either. Bright examples of New York and London are in front of people’s eyes. against this background, the experience of Belarus means little. For this reason, I do not think that covidskepticism has great prospects in Russia in the near future.
Interesting to know, thanks! I still find it a bit odd for a true believer to hold a mass event so soon, but perhaps the Kremlin thinks of it as a one-off.
The Kremlin have sided with the WHO to posture against Trump, essentially. Their primary goal is projecting an image of Russia as the world’s best friend, as we saw with Syria last year and worthless medical supplies to Italy this year. Privately, probably many of them think it’s all bullshit; they just don’t care about ordinary Russians in the least. Once again – though no one is reading – this is because all Russians care about is getting off of work and, if they have one, going to their dacha.
The “opposition” here is not covidskepticism – it’s a narrative that Russian authorities are skewing the number of deaths downward to make themselves look better. This was very quickly arrived at by grafting coronamania, which Russians are too superstitious and herdlike to dispute, onto their existing mistrust of the authorities, who do have a tendency to under-report “negative externalities”. The notion that the WHO and entire Western power structure are grossly inflating the numbers at every turn is totally outside of their ken.
Russians are already afraid of dirt, for example. They used to squat because they are terrified of sitting on the ground, which they view as scandalous and bizarre. Keeping them all indoors because of some virus, that was easy.
So it’s an exercise in absolute futility trying to talk to Russians about it. Though I recently got sort of lost in a large park and a nice guy who showed me the way out was blunt in his rejection of the whole thing. We shook hands.
Not arguing with you, but if a healthy 25 year old white female American contracts Coronavirus, what are her chances of dying from it?
I’m not Brazilian but I lived in Brazil many years.
Hmm, first of all, Brazil is quite big, it’s like the U.S., and you also don’t have high-speed trains in the U.S. Actually, Brazil doesn’t even have a “low-speed” railway infrastructure, because it was all dismantled to make way for a system of highways for cars and trucks. So most commercial transportation is by trucks (or ships).
As for transport of passengers between cities, major cities are served by a relatively good system of buses (certainly much better than Greyhound). But yes, not so fast, considering the distances. Travelling by air used to be very expensive (it was cheaper to fly to Europe or to the US than internally), but in the last decades it became more affordable, at least for the middle class. For the poor, it’s still a dream.
I don’t think that public transportation is the biggest of Brazilian problems. The biggest one is drugs (similar to the cartel situation in Mexico) and crime in general. This is likely caused by a large (and poor) African-mixed population, unfortunately the stereotype that blacks or black-mixed people tend to be more violent is largely true. Also, police and the law in general doesn’t work very well in Brazil, there’s a lot of low-level (and high-level) corruption, so there’s a lot of crime. If it wasn’t for crime, actually, Brazil could be a relatively nice place to live, and I am sure that many Brazilians would return to the country instead of living abroad.
There are few blacks in the elite or even in the middle class as there is in the US, first, because the US is much richer and some blacks have more opportunities, i.e. in politics, business, etc, also there’s more affirmative action and other policies in the U.S, second, in Brazil there was much more racial mixing, so you may not have “pure blacks” in the middle class but you have several mulattos. But the lack of blacks is not really due so much to “racism”, but mostly to the fact that they tend to be less educated and less capable. There is no lack of Jews, and even Asians, among rich businessmen and politicians.
Your ideas are fantastically far from reality
The methodology of this post is truly marvelous. We have that 0.1% of the Swedish population, from a certain suburban area near Stockholm, produces 40% of the mortality. But we insist on comparing it to the equally tan peoples of Finland. No mention is made of differences in nursing homes between Sweden and the other countries. It is well known that nursing homes represent a large fraction of covid deaths (50-60% in most countries), meaning that they are probably all the excess mortality, which is well below the extravagant numbers of worldometer.
The data on Belarus and Brazil are, at best, inconclusive, and they reflect the inconclusiveness in EU data, where a correlation between lockdown severity and excess mortality is not seen (this one using minimally biased excess mortality data from euromomo.eu). Yet correlations exist within countries and are extremely strong and well documented: metabolic syndrome, vit. D deficiency, nursing home quantity, quality and policies about them (like, for example, forcing nursing homes to take in covid patients).
The plots only show confirmed cases, a biased quantity which depends most strongly on testing, and which could actually be a benign number, since our only choice out of this is to develop herd immunity. Alas, at least in the West, this is all the analysis we are going to get, since it is clear that the suicide wave has already started, so excess mortality is going to be quite compromised. If it is true that suicides have increased 10X, they should overtake covid in a 2 months in the USA.
Corona in Wisconsin. ROTFL
https://twitter.com/Communism_Kills/status/1265464269384138757
It’s disappointing that Karlin bought 100% into Corona panic. He’s Russian, and Russians are supposed to be tough. Germans are the germ-freaks. Russians are Slavs who are supposed to be earthy, wrestle with bears, catch fish with dicks, binge on vodka, and drive like lunatics.
OT, but say, if you got rid of all the nerds and geeks, say they were carted off to another star system, what would happen? I imagine all of the normal neurotypical smart people who work as lawyers, actuaries, and engineers could still come up with a fair bit or scientific output, and could also do decently working in a lab even if you lost the stereotypical geeks and nerds.
I think deaths at nursing homes should be separated out as those deaths are probably due to systematic failures within the nursing home industry within each country and to whether or not bars are open.
Sweden’s approach was the correct one. The globalists are trying to bring them in line with the lockdown lies. Sweden, Ja!
In my years supervising R&D related product development, the boffins ground through the data and found out what you should have known anyway. There is definitely a place for hard work. However, the leaps of intuition usually came from the extremely intelligent neurotypicals. That said, disproportionately musical in my experience.
The only correct and right approach was that of Taiwan and New Zealand and few other countries. Sweden is what the ‘globalist’ wanted. Herd immunity was the meme that we were blasted with first by TPTB in UK and the US.. The curve flattering was their second backup choice. They wanted high psychological impact of the epidemic by high death rate and economic slowdown to make all the world angry with China. Sweden is there to prevent the curve flattening strategy to transform into the virus elimination strategy that was successfully implement in Taiwan and Ne Zealand. Misguided people like yourself are advocating what your enemy wanted in the first place. Sweden is there meme. As Mark Twain observed it is easier fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled and so far nobody yet succeed to un-fool the lolbertarians but I remain hopeful you will see the light.
At the beginning of Feb, I guessed that there might be 10k dead in Wuhan before it got controlled. And then how many families would’ve been in great pain, and how much the political stability would’ve been hanging on a thread. It was a brief moment that I was fearing for a mideast kind of situation developing in China.
And now in US there are 100k dead. And yet it seems that it took some NYT trickery to make people feel the pain.
It is frankly baffling.
I am guessing that maybe in China the grandparents living together with the family thus making the loss of them a much felt pain? And that in the US the grandparents are in nursing homes and outside the family therefore the pain is not much felt?
I understand this topic is somewhat inappropriate, …
This scam is unraveling by the moment. Cue next major distraction. Massive fire season maybe? Poisoned water system? Prion meat disease? What will they think of next?
So many anons be like, die for the economy.
Like wtf. Literally wtf.
Mother fuckers screaming pro life and turns around n tell everyone it is OK to kill grandparents.
Wtf.
6 weeks of quarantine n this virus is over. Or make wearing masks into law for the next 9 months. Problem also solved.
So many dumb anons I swear.
This incredibly dumb shit during election year should have some inevitable consequences like dropping Trump’s approval rating at least 20% among people over 65.
It’s deceptive to chose to focus on the past seven days of DAILY death numbers, without explaining why you don’t use the less noisy and more informative TOTAL or cumulative death numbers. It’s also cherry picking to only compare Sweden to three other European countries.
Here’s what a fair summary would look like:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&deathsMetric=true&totalFreq=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&country=GBR+ESP+DEU+FRA+BEL+DNK+ITA+NLD+SWE+USA+NOR+FIN
The election will be an interesting test of corona narratives. The polls suggested that Biden was slightly favored to win the popular vote before corona and also by comparison with the previous election we can take the baseline assumption that Trump is going to lose the popular vote by a small margin but possibly win the presidency anyway thanks to the electoral system. Major deviations from that will likely be due to corona.
Corona measures have largely been left to the states and Democrat governors have mostly chosen lockdowns and corona panic while Republican governors have chosen a much more corona skeptic line. Trump has declared that he won’t support lockdowns even if there’s another wave. By election day there will be more evidence of which way is the right way and I believe by then the Republican line will be proven to be better. If there’s the promised second wave and the Democrats push for another lockdown, Trump will win by a landslide.
Sure, in New York they’ll scream murder and journalists based there will create a media bubble again but Trump’s base will think that New York messed up its own affairs and then blames Trump.
Trump’s supporters believes USA is doing better than south korea in handling the covid 19.
Unless something super, super crazy happens, I see zombiden losing by a few million miles.
If the death toll reaches 200k before Nov, zombiden might have a chance vs the sprayed tan orange hair. But it is just a small chance.
Partial lockdown does jack shit, it just prolongs the pandemic.
A 6 week full quarantine n this shit is over. N we can get back with our lives.
And if wearing masks can lower r0 below 1. That would also work.
The Norwegians have just admitted that the lockdown was unnecessary and that the virus was on its way out already.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/norway-health-chief-lockdown-was-not-needed-to-tame-covid
This tells me you’re not actually in Russia, or haven’t spent any significant amount of time here that was not confined to tourist spots and hotels, as anyone who has done so would know exactly what I am talking about. It’s the same reason they all keep тапочки at home and those annoying plastic booties in clinics, of course.
But I invite you to come here, or return, and sit upon the ground in public – everyone will stare at you as if you’re mad, and eventually babushka will flat out ask if you are, before muttering something like “какой ужас, господи” as she trundles away. Which is the extent of their personality.
Yea though, my ideas are pure fantasy. I’m making all this up. Russia – paradise on earth, as everyone knows.
They’re not. I tried walking outside barefoot once – thought they were going to have me committed. They’re also just intolerant of any amount of nonconformism, so if you’re doing what they don’t do, you’re weird and crazy. It’s a sad, oppressive kind of society, absolutely not the stuff of white nationalist imagination.
South Korea does not have many blacks and other such third world people, obviously it is going to do better.
Off Topic.
IMF growth projections 2020.
Gentleman comments ?
Ethiopia really is a bright spot in Africa.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD/SRB/ROU/BGR/KHM
IMFInternational Monetary Fund
DataMapper
Datasets World Economic Outlook (April 2020) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Real GDP growth
Afghanistan -3
Albania -5
Algeria -5.2
American Samoa no data
Andorra no data
Angola -1.4
Anguilla no data
Antigua and Barbuda -10
Argentina -5.7
Armenia -1.5
Aruba -13.7
Australia -6.7
Austria -7
Azerbaijan -2.2
Bahamas, The -8.3
Bahrain -3.6
Bangladesh 2
Barbados -7.6
Belarus -6
Belgium -6.9
Belize -12
Benin 4.5
Bermuda no data
Bhutan 2.7
Bolivia -2.9
Bonaire no data
Bosnia and Herzegovina -5
Botswana -5.4
Brazil -5.3
British Virgin Islands no data
Brunei Darussalam 1.3
Bulgaria -4
Burkina Faso 2
Burundi -5.5
Cabo Verde -4
Cambodia -1.6
Cameroon -1.2
Canada -6.2
Cayman Islands no data
Central African Republic 1
Chad -0.2
Channel Islands no data
Chile -4.5
China, People’s Republic of 1.2
Colombia -2.4
Comoros -1.2
Congo, Dem. Rep. of the -2.2
Congo, Republic of -2.3
Cook Islands no data
Costa Rica -3.3
Côte d’Ivoire 2.7
Croatia -9
Cuba no data
Curacao no data
Cyprus -6.5
Czech Republic -6.5
Denmark -6.5
Djibouti 1
Dominica -4.7
Dominican Republic -1
Ecuador -6.3
Egypt 2
El Salvador -5.4
Equatorial Guinea -5.5
Eritrea 0.1
Estonia -7.5
Eswatini -0.9
Ethiopia 3.2
Faeroe Islands no data
Falkland Islands no data
Fiji -5.8
Finland -6
France -7.2
French Guiana no data
French Polynesia no data
Gabon -1.2
Gambia, The 2.5
Georgia -4
Germany -7
Ghana 1.5
Gibraltar no data
Greece -10
Greenland no data
Grenada -8
Guadeloupe no data
Guam no data
Guatemala -2
Guinea 2.9
Guinea-Bissau -1.5
Guyana 52.8
Haiti -4
Holy See no data
Honduras -2.4
Hong Kong SAR -4.8
Hungary -3.1
Iceland -7.2
India 1.9
Indonesia 0.5
Iran -6
Iraq -4.7
Ireland -6.8
Isle of Man no data
Israel -6.3
Italy -9.1
Jamaica -5.6
Japan -5.2
Jordan -3.7
Kazakhstan -2.5
Kenya 1
Kiribati 0
Korea, Dem. People’s Rep. of no data
Korea, Republic of -1.2
Kosovo -5
Kuwait -1.1
Kyrgyz Republic -4
Lao P.D.R. 0.7
Latvia -8.6
Lebanon -12
Lesotho -5.2
Liberia -2.5
Libya -58.7
Liechtenstein no data
Lithuania -8.1
Luxembourg -4.9
Macao SAR -29.6
Madagascar 0.4
Malawi 1
Malaysia -1.7
Maldives -8.1
Mali 1.5
Malta -2.8
Marshall Islands -0.2
Martinique no data
Mauritania -2
Mauritius -6.8
Mayotte no data
Mexico -6.6
Micronesia, Fed. States of -0.4
Moldova -3
Monaco no data
Mongolia -1
Montenegro -9
Montserrat no data
Morocco -3.7
Mozambique 2.2
Myanmar 1.8
Namibia -2.5
Nauru -1.7
Nepal 2.5
Netherlands -7.5
New Caledonia no data
New Zealand -7.2
Nicaragua -6
Niger 1
Nigeria -3.4
Niue no data
North Macedonia -4
Northern Mariana Islands no data
Norway -6.3
Oman -2.8
Pakistan -1.5
Palau -11.9
Panama -2
Papua New Guinea -1
Paraguay -1
Peru -4.5
Philippines 0.6
Pitcairn no data
Poland -4.6
Portugal -8
Puerto Rico -6
Qatar -4.3
Reunion no data
Romania -5
Russian Federation -5.5
Rwanda 3.5
Saint Helena no data
Saint Kitts and Nevis -8.1
Saint Lucia -8.5
Saint Martin no data
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines -4.5
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon no data
Samoa -3.7
San Marino -12.2
São Tomé and Príncipe -6
Saudi Arabia -2.3
Senegal 3
Serbia -3
Seychelles -10.8
Sierra Leone -2.3
Singapore -3.5
Sint Maarten no data
Slovak Republic -6.2
Slovenia -8
Solomon Islands -2.1
Somalia -2.5
South Africa -5.8
South Sudan, Republic of 4.9
Spain -8
Sri Lanka -0.5
Sudan -7.2
Suriname -4.9
Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands no data
Sweden -6.8
Switzerland -6
Syria no data
Taiwan Province of China -4
Tajikistan 1
Tanzania 2
Thailand -6.7
Timor-Leste -3
Togo 1
Tokelau no data
Tonga -1.2
Trinidad and Tobago -4.5
Tunisia -4.3
Turkey -5
Turkmenistan 1.8
Turks and Caicos Islands no data
Tuvalu -1
Uganda 3.5
Ukraine -7.7
United Arab Emirates -3.5
United Kingdom -6.5
United States -5.9
United States Virgin Islands no data
Uruguay -3
Uzbekistan 1.8
Vanuatu -3.3
Venezuela -15
Vietnam 2.7
Wallis and Futuna Islands no data
West Bank and Gaza no data
Western Sahara no data
Yemen -3
Zambia -3.5
Zimbabwe -7.4
It seems that a lot of millennials and Zers have dysfunctional relationship with their boomer parents, so maybe they have an unconscious desire to wish for their deaths?
O_o! Well thank you, a little laugh is always good
https://www.tourtrans.ru/images/countries/rossiya/sankt-peterburg/shutterstock_145779566.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHxz2pSXsAECTug.jpg
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/spbghost/64939546/130903/130903_original.jpg
https://st3.depositphotos.com/3288999/15316/i/950/depositphotos_153161764-stock-photo-young-people-rest-on-palace.jpg
https://kudamoscow.ru/uploads/239c6e61baa042aa9c56d7d5ae830f06.jpg
https://www.4music.ru/uploads/images/p/i/t/piterskaja_s_dnjom_rozhdenija.jpg
Not so fast, Bob. The retrieval of R from crappy data like the noisy data from a country with small number of cases like Norway is more art than science even if it is mathematically rigorous and requires fancy math. The result is entirely depended on several assumption like what is the infection to symptoms mean or median (I2S) period. In the graph form the Norwegian report
https://www.fhi.no/contentassets/c9e459cd7cc24991810a0d28d7803bd0/notat-om-risiko-og-respons-2020-05-05.pdf
https://i.ibb.co/QHVXdH0/Norway.png
they show the retrieved R but you should look at the daily hospitalization cases (purple). The maximum of daily hospitalizations occurs on March 25 which means that on March 25 minus I2S the reproduction number R must have dropped to 1. What is the value I2S? For every country it can be slightly different. American CDC states:
This would mean that the period from infection to hospitalization will be 5 days or somewhat longer. So R=1 happend on March 20 or few days earlier. This is our estimate of R.
Now in the Norwegian report we can also find the following on the page 12:
So R dropped from 3.10 to 0.67 three days after the lockdown countermeasures (March 12) were introduced. (“…when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on 12 March…” – The Spectator). Such great drop from 3.10 to 0.67 in two days after the lockdown certainly is the proof of the effectiveness of lockdown countermeasure.
The question is why the discrepancy? Why R in Figure 4 is different than in the text and different from eyeballing the hospitalization data that we did? My opinion is that the R in Figure 4 is a pure fiction.
The message that the lockdowns were unnecessary is coming from the same circles that wanted to push for herd immunity option in the first place but they were somewhat delayed by the equally senseless curve flattening option.
Camille Stoltenberg who several days ago gave the interview about the Norwegian report is the head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health but also the sister of Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of the Nato defense alliance, and Norway’s former prime minister.
The BS that lockdowns were not necessary is coming from the highest echelons of power in Europe. Now asks yourself, Bob why is it so? Your darling Sweden was carrying out the policy dictated by the highest echelons of power in Europe from the very beginning. It is really funny that all kind of libertarians, anti-gov and alt-right geniuses found themselves advocating what Stoltenbergs of this world really wanted.
You can read my take why the shenanigans with the curve flattening and herd immunity and why we never heard about the VIRUS ELIMINATION option here:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/which-one-is-austria-and-which-one-is-australia/#comment-3913963
US should reach at least 200k dead at the start/middle of September.
You’re absolutely right, the real Russia is basically Sweden minus autism, not some mega-Bosnia.
You’re nuts. Please stay away from Russia and never come back, we don’t need your kind here.
Jorge Paulo Lemann, who is the second richest man in Brazil, is not Jewish, according to this news story:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/an-elite-private-academy-in-rio-puts-pressure-on-the-citys-jewish-day-schools/
The irony of someone seething about wannabe epidemiologists then going to copy paste what he read in an article he just searched up is palpable.
Lemann (Lehman) not Jewish? I would be very surprised. Maybe not-practising, maybe mixed, but I’m skeptical. Also why is a non-Jew investing in elite schools for Jews.
Karlin is the descendant of caucasian aristocracy. Racist stereotypes are more like that he will attack you with the family’s dancing sword if you said that his sister is cute, but not jump in a cold river, and I believe that caucasian bears will be safety hunted by shooting arrows at them from the top of the horse.
The idea of that you mustn’t wear a mask, and that being infected with an unknown and dangerous new virus, is a sign of manliness – is this some unpredicted anglosaxon genetic behaviour, or just the next stage of Western idiocracy?
In their defence, if the IFR of coronavirus is really 0.2 percent, then even 70 year olds or 80 year olds are not in any significant danger here, still they should wear a surgical mask when they are in crowded places just for a piece of mind.
I think he is saying that he likes to relax by sitting in the middle of a street, and doesn’t care if he gets dirt on his ass. He is not saying he likes to sit in the beach or grass like normal people. It is not normal for a Russian person sitting in asphalt in the road (and neither in civilized Europe) after you leave kinder garten.
–
By comparison, in the Jewish culture, many people are usually sitting on the asphalt in the road and pavement. In the middle of a pavement, in a busy shopping street in Israel, groups of people are often sitting randomly on the street – they can be talking, or even reading books or eating lunch on the asphalt.
For Israeli people, if you want a rest, it’s fashionable to sit in the street, even though there might be cat piss and dog shit. I wonder if it is similar in India and other Middle Eastern countries.
(It’s funny that this website is obsessed about Jews and Israel, but it seems to know so little about the country, that I never read anyone notice that one of the culture shocks of Israel, is people are sitting on the road).
Self doxxing?
I’m not saying it would be the best use of their limited resources in Brazil to spend it on this (and sadly I know nothing about Brazil), but the distances would still be suitable for rail transportation, including high-speed ones.
Distance between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, is 359 kilometres. (Rio to Recife is 1873 kilometres).
Distance between Tokyo and Osaka, is 397 kilometres, and they operated a high-speed train between them since the 1960s. Moreover, in Japan, it was a far more difficult, as the train has to travel through many mountains, and required vast tunneling projects.
Sapporo to Kagoshima is 2393 kilometres and there is mostly high-speed train between them, going under the sea between islands. (It required the largest undersea tunnels ever constructed in the world. Kanmon Tunnel was already completed in the 1940s, and Seikan Tunnel delayed to the 1980s).
Distance between Moscow and Saint-Petersburg is 636 kilometres, and train link of two cities has been good since the 19th century.
Distance between Shanghai and Beijing/Peking 1939 kilometre. China is still a third world country, and yet they could construct advanced public transport across such distances.
It is likely true to describe the current situation; and possibly there could be genetic tendency which promotes it.
But it has not been tested that there is genetic tendency, and neither that such “violent tendencies” in a population could resist embourgeoisement (which very few others have).
Whenever I hear such pessimist claims about Africans – I recall that there is no genetic difference between the English football hooligan throwing beer bottles, and English gentleman discussing a Schubert sonata outside Wigmore Hall; and yet you would think the two people were from a different species.
Or recall that there is a no genetic difference between bourgeois hipsters that now predominate a “gay hipster” city like central Moscow, and a “gopnik” who is speaking with prison slang near the entrance of “Red & White” in the working class area of a normal city. Yet – they became like two people from a different galaxy.
Was that for melanf?
Here is a real picture of melanf, he posted it last time to prove he is not a “progressive man”.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQDKMZ6VewGNRdnSwgs7y53T_gaI21uDLSGoVre96fTvxqZ-oS2&usqp.jpg
There doesn’t seem to be anything unconscious about it!
Yes, and we are encouraging my elderly Mom to wear an N95 mask as we resume going to church, restaurants, dentist, barber / hair salon, etc. often together. (We are not doing any of this in LA County, where we live, but in slightly more open Orange County and other much more open counties farther afield).
But masks should be voluntary for old people as well as young.
“It is really funny that all kind of libertarians, anti-gov and alt-right geniuses found themselves advocating what Stoltenbergs of this world really wanted.”
The beauty of this incoherence….
So self imprisonment, taking orders from the criminal gang writ large aka the parasitic state is libertarian? As a result, a proper communist believes in private property, and a proper libertarian believes in shutdowns by government thugs?
His parents were Swiss immigrants to Brazil. I don’t see why his last name is any indication of him being Jewish.
According to that Times of Israel piece,
and
Regardless of this, the answer to why he is investing on it would be the same in either case: because it is profitable.
How do you know that? According to Gregory Clark, there is:
Taken from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)
I would suggest glove for her too. One she can sanitized before taking off. Never hurts to be too cautious when a life is concerned.
Be a Russian, not a Pussian.
Instead of projecting strange cults of imaginary “masculine practices” on others, you could just practice it yourself.
Hey, I’m a fan of passenger rail transportation, and I hate buses. I would like if they created a system of speed rail in Brazil. But as I said, in Brazil it was all dismantled decades ago. Except for commuter trains, railways are used only for cargo. Also, Brazil is not Japan.
Copenhagen is dense urban but they ride bikes. Stockholm is dense urban but they ride buses and trains. Relatively speaking of course.
I was also going to disagree with the claim that Coronachan
…because as we all know, about a week ago the CDC revised down their estimate of IFR to 0.26%.
So I was going to give that naughty ‘@UK’ person a good shellacking for writing 99.9% instead of 99.74%. Such imprecision simply will not do!
Then I noticed that @UK had written “for most people“.
So I paused, and thought: “Wait a minute. I know how to read. Those might be important words, and I had better try to comprehend them before I upbraid @UK, lest I go off half-cocked and look like a total fucking goose right in the middle of the internet.”
So I read it again, and lo they were important words!
So I did some sums.
Demographically, “people under 65 with no existing chronic conditions” is a much larger cohort than “chronically-ill people over 75“.
A very very large proportion of covid19 deaths-with are in the latter group. Even morbidly-obese under-65s have fuck-all chance of getting their ticket clipped by covid19.
So for most people, 99.9% is about right, and you ought to be ashamed for not knowing that.
Side note: to go straight to attacking the messenger when you obviously have no fucking idea about the numbers, makes you a fucking retard.
Thanks!
I put the “most people” injection also a hook so that it might somehow lead people reading it to think about how the discriminatory nature of the Coronavirus is an opportunity that we seem mostly to have passed on.
Or to put it another way, profiling is how you defeat a disease (biological or social) with the least inconvenience. Want to reduce fighting outside bars on a Saturday night efficiently? Tell the police to keep an eye on where men between 18 and 35 congregate and drink. That is a profile, it is based off easily observed facts. Want to reduce Coronavirus deaths efficiently? Enable the old and vulnerable to isolate. That is a profile too, and for the same reason.
What a gift it is that this virus poses essentially no danger to those below middle age. And yet it is those below middle age who suffer most in lockdown and, bizarrely (because of anxiety/dumb ideologies/control freakery) are the most likely to support the lockdown.
I’m now in a part of Brazil that is barely affected and the restaurants were reopened some time ago. Sadly the vegan restaurants all remain closed, no doubt because the young owners and managers think it is their social duty to insist that Bolsonaro, with his refusal to lock people in their homes and strip them of their civil liberties, is somehow Hitler Mark 2.
(He did say something mildly offensive about homosexuality, I suppose…)
Meanwhile the German restaurant serving meat-centred traditional fare to upper-middle class oldsters is humming along.
I guess it tracks attitudes in the West to immigration as well. The young suffer most but are for it. The old get cheaper cleaners and carers and servers but recognise the long-term issues it causes. Perhaps it is all as simple as young people being short-sighted and the old having greater perspective.
Picking nice cherries there. More proof you’ve never been or lived here, not that it matters. I said my bit.
Yes, I gave the standard answer of about two weeks, but it seems this is more of an average.
From an overview by the Public Health Agency:
Finland shows how to do it: start a hysteria over the need for masks, find out that the country doesn’t have enough masks for the entire population and that it can’t make them fast enough because all the factories were shipped off to China and then quickly just collectively forget the whole idea of wearing masks and resume normal life.
Worked for us and we never even got to the point where we would argue over whether it’s manly or not to wear a mask.
Don’t be a Chieh-pet.
Unforgivably cruel: Swedish directives on how to treat Covid-19 elderly have caused massive death toll
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/490012-swedish-directives-covid-elderly-cruel/
ML is just another American expat lecturing Russians on what Russianness is.
He has some very… powerful ideas about us.
In other words, the high elderly death toll in Sweden has nothing at all to do with the lack of lockdown and everything to do with their policies regarding elderly in nursing homes.
If these anecdotes check out, then the real killer in Sweden is once again the fear and hysteria that you advocate as their health officials have assumed a massive flood of cases into hospitals that would require triage and they’ve pre-emptively decided to leave the very old outside treatment. So a bunch of elderly people died needlessly as hospitals refused them and instead gave priority to imaginary young corona patients.
If this is how it happens the next question is whether this was top level government policy or whether it was a decision of some lower level officials who, like mr utu, were morally and emotionally horrified by the lack of lockdown and mistakenly assumed that Sweden would need to let elderly die to save hospitals from being overwhelmed by corona patients.
Either way it’s all further (but anecdotal) evidence against general lockdown and towards the case that all the differences in death toll between countries are about their policy regarding elderly.
Fully agree with this. It’s one thing to approve of the Swedish strategy and quite another to approve of its execution, which has clearly been less than marvelous.
Maybe the only way the Swedes are keeping their ICU bed occupancy down is to turn away everybody over 70 in order to deliberately keep the figures on ICU bed occupancy down? Or maybe the spreading of coronavirus thought the care home was due to a policy of deliberate neglect, instead of incompetence, in order for the Swedish government to save on long term medical costs by just allowing coronavirus to kill the elderly? This may also be part of their herd immunity strategy, by allowing the coronavirus to thin the herd of the over 70 in order to save on long run pensions costs, given how they are such a budget issue, while at the same time making noises about isolating the vulnerable, which they know full well beforehand is impossible to achieve effectively. Of course know they are feigning incompetence instead of malice.
Why would you say it? Just because you want it be so? Are you into casting spells onto reality? Stop being a coward and face the reality? Sweden by choosing to not protect human lives demonstrated that life is not high on its agenda, so it should not surprise anybody that similar disregard we can see in nursing homes. Actually it is much worse. Their medical system was not overwhelmed, they dd not have to do triaging and yet they refused to treat some patients and allowed them to die refusing to provide oxygen if only for a palliative care. It just looks like a planned slaughter. It is hard to believe the degree of callousness in country that prided itself on being the paragon of human rights, etc.
I remember in April one could hear from Swedes, probably repeating after their epidemiologists, that the epidemic comes after the vulnerable first and once it infects and kills them the epidemic would slow down and so on. This is clearly a pseudo-scientific theory however if you open the doors to the nursing homes on purpose and help the sick to die you can make this pseudo-scientific theory to become reality. Spreading the pseudo-scientific theory that the epidemic comes first after the vulnerable was an alibi building for the planned crime.
You are correct it was the execution of the elderly and also very cruel. You should be ashamed of your country and yourself. Those who approve of Swedish strategy should not count themselves as members of European civilization.