International COVID-19 Megathread

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Mild symptoms according to Number 10.

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Even when it peaks, it won't be over. We might be looking at July before we get back to 'normal'.

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Ha, surprising how mediocre Switzerland is on both the hospital beds and intensive care beds, despite having, by some distance, the most expensive healthcare system in Europe.

Maybe the private insurance model isn't all it's cracked up to be?

Intensive care isn't something that private companies tend to touch - there's no profit in it. In the UK, that stuff is sent to the NHS.

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Outside Moscow, and St Petersburg, the Russian healthcare system is pretty poor. It was never that great during Soviet days either.

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346 new UK deaths reported today. Also, the quarantine proposal, which seems very much to be one of those "leak it and see what the reaction is" moves, is a sledgehammer to crack a nut that has already given someone anaphylactic shock.

Also, if we're still running a lot of cases, who exactly is going to come here on holiday?

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Meh, Germany's reproduction rate yesterday rose to 1.1. Hopefully this isn't a trend, because it means the numbers start rising again.

Isn't the R figure based on comparing cases recorded per day? Also, it's a flawed measure, because no-one infects 1.1 people.

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Almost universal agreement that the "new" government messaging is nonsensical.

"Stay Alert" - meaning what exactly? "Control The Virus" - how do you even "control" a virus FFS??

Seriously, who came up with this utter cack?

Not really much better than the previous one. Those dying in care homes were hardly going clubbing after all.

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Yes, I know that's how mathematics work. An integer measure, say 10/11, would be easier to understand.

Also, the R figure is an average that masks huge variations even in a single community.

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The range given in the Robert Koch Institute report was between 0.90 and 1.34.

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They do need to make some stuff clearer, that's for sure. They also need to remind business that the Control of Substances Hazard to Health Regulations cover this virus as it is a "biological agent".

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Germany's Robert Koch Institute is still seeing a 1.13 R rate, but is noting that is on a pretty low base and needs more data.

Hamburg interestingly reported zero new cases on Saturday and a number of other states were in single digits.

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Latest German R estimate is down to 1.07.

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The Academy are being somewhat consistent, as Covid-19 is a "maladie"...

The disease is called Covid-19, the virus is called SARS-CoV-2 and the latter is one of the coronavirus family.

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Labour have major reputational issues these days.

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At a low base like that, R gets less reliable.

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Fewer than 500 total virus related deaths in the UK today, the lowest *weekday* figure since the end of March. On the face of it encouraging, the question now is if the government's recent confused and/or reckless actions bring along some sort of "second wave" in a few weeks.

I somehow doubt that it will; much of the pandemic is in care homes now. Also, with London likely having the highest overall infection rate in the UK, there's possibly a small degree of 'herd immunity' already in play.

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Switzerland's borders with Austria, France and Germany will in theory be opening again on the 15th of June. Looks like a week in July sitting on a rainy beach in Brittany is back on!

Germany plans to reopen its borders with France, Switzerland and Austria then too; with full opening of the Luxembourg border this coming September.

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Germany's R figure has dropped to 0.81 (0.66-0.97 95% interval) with 13 states reporting less than 100 new infections with 12 of those below 50; only Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia are above that figure. 5 states are reporting single digit increases.

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Oh, the actual closing of the border at the time wasn't particularly controversial - it was a scarier time; and as much as anything else, it was a way of restricting movement and contact. The fact it was also an international border was almost incidental in achieving that, it some ways.

The thing is though, people who live in thosee border metro areas - the Genevas, Basels, Kontanzes; you often start to build their lives on both sides of the border - be it relationships, school, work, leisure or whatever. I mean, me personally, I had friends at school and uni who lived in France, there was a time where I used to cross the border half a dozen times a day just because it shortened my commute. So in that respect, seeing an actual physical barrier go up was quite a big shock for the people who live there. And I think (hope) that it will give people a renewed appreciation of just how precious, and how valuable it is to them on an individual level, having that freedom to move arouns actually is.

The fact that Kreuzlingen, which is not at all a left-wing town, was pushing so hard for to take the fence down, feels encouraging at least.

Konstanz was the Germany city that escaped serious bombing in the war by turning its lights on and pretending to be part of Switzerland, i believe.

Also, plenty of other border metro areas; in some cases, you have cities that there were once in the same country now divided by the border.

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England is recording roughly 1,000 new cases a day from the testing, something going down slowly over time. We're not out of the woods yet, but there doesn't appear to be any second spike since restrictions were eased on 11 May.

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Germany is down to 677 patients in ICU.

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/2020-06-01-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

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The mitigation strategy is the Swedish strategy and I believe it was the one followed on the 1968 pandemic.

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Do you have any data on regional levels of infections?

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Aren't most of the new Polish cases around a coal mine?

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Two rather interesting articles on the effects of social distancing and lockdowns:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7_reference.pdf - on Europe

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2404-8_reference.pdf - on a more international scale