International COVID-19 Megathread

[President Johnson]

Germany reporting 1,707 new cases in the past 24 hours. The highest number since early April. According to the RKI, nearly 40% of them were infected on foreign soil, coming back from vacation. This is truly a concerning trend we see here. Maybe it slows down again once the main vacation season is over in early/mid September. But falling temperatures may cancel that effect out again.

[Silent Hunter]

Austria is back on the UK's quarantine list, along with Croatia, while Portugal is off it.

[Mike88]

Portugal update: the slow burn continues

21 August update: (compared with yesterday)

Total cases: 55,211 (+219)
Active cases: 12,946 (+6)
Deaths: 1,792 (+4)
Recoveries: 40,473 (+209)
Patients in ICU: 41 (+2)
Patients hospitalized: 321 (-13)

1,880,235 tests conducted since March 1st.

Also, the government approved, yesterday, the purchase of almost 7 million Covid-19 vaccines in a investment of around 20 million euros. This vaccine is from the Oxford university, that reached an agreement with the EU in the last few weeks. The Health secretary expects the distribution of the vaccine to start during the end of 2020 and will be first given to the most vulnerable, elderly and others, and care givers. PM António Costa also announced that vaccination will be "universal and free".

[President Johnson]

And finally the mark of 2,000 new infections per day is broken in Germany. A lot seems to be caused by tourists coming back home and a number private events. I think we need to restrict family gatherings again in order to turn this most late trend.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Italy's cases per day have been growing for a bit now and yesterday they were almost 1,000 and this is pretty concerning.
On the other hand they seem to be asymptomatic/mild/etc. for the most part and deaths per day are still close to zero

P.S. Should we update the name to the thread? "10 million cases and counting" sounds kind of a pretty big understatement now that we are at 23 million cases.

[Silent Hunter]

There seems to be strong evidence of a more infectious but less deadly mutation (known as D614G) of the virus out there.

[palandio]

There seems to be strong evidence of a more infectious but less deadly mutation (known as D614G) of the virus out there.

Yes, I read that, too. And the virological research on the mutation sounds plausible.

The main problem that I have with the news coverage is that while the findings are relatively new, the mutation itself is absolutely not. In fact the first occurrence was in late January and most of the European wave in spring was already caused by the mutated virus.

Just compare the following two colorings of the same phylogenetic tree:
Colored by Genotype at S site 614
Colored by Continent

[Tender Branson]

In Austria, the overall number of deaths between Jan-June 2020 was 0.5% higher than last year.

Without COVID-deaths, it would have been ca. 1.5% lower (42.200 this year vs. 42.800 last year):

STATISTICS Austria released demographic data for the first half of 2020:

Births decreased by 1.5% compared to Jan-June 2019.

Deaths increased by 0.5% compared to Jan-June 2019.

Link, by month

Link, by state and district

Without the 700 COVID-deaths in the first half of 2020, the overal number of deaths would have gone down by 1.5% as well, just like births.

The Austrian population increased by 14.000 in the first half of 2020, which was ca. the same amount as in the first half of 2019 when it increased by 13.600 people.

Link (quarterly population)

Surprisingly, the population growth in Q2 - during the lockdown - did not result in lower population growth ...

[CumbrianLefty]

Of course it is the normal virus "path" for mutations to be more spreadable but less deadly. There are exceptions to this, but they are not that common.

[President Johnson]

Germany likely to end mandatory Covid tests for tourists heading back home from high-risk areas. The reason is definitely ridiculous: Not enough testing capabilities. Currently, there are about 870,000 tests conducted on a daily basis.

[urutzizu]

Yeah, they will replace it with 14 days of quarantine again with the possibility of release after five days if you can show a negative pcr. The Idea of testing everybody sounds very nice in principle, and and there have been calls in a number of countries (such as UK or Italy) to follow Germany, but in practice there a big problems with it:

It has caused testing capacity to be overstreched (93% is used up in Berlin for instance), and it is risking test capacity in care and hospital settings. A major reason for this is that they are free, which seemingly has encouraged people to travel into high risk areas at tax payers expense, which has been very controversial in Germany. However it was probably necessary, because while you could probably force people flying to high risk areas to pay for it as part of the flight ticket or something, if you force people to pay, those entering by road, especially those visiting family in Romania/Balkans, which are the highest risk group, will avoid getting tested as enforcement is near to impossible there.
In addition it seems as if it is not as safe as made out to be, with Immediate Tests after arriving missing infections that happened within the few days before flying back, giving people a false sense of safety to return to work (whence why many employers including my own are banning people coming back from say Turkey from working until 14 Days have passed even if they have a negative test.).
In addition the enforcement even at airports has been mired with trouble with potentially infected returnees standing for hours next to each other in huge lines, even people who wanted to be tested on their own accord not being able to actually find the testing center, and those that didn't presumably just walking out of the Airport as there are basically no controls. Also lots of mixing between non-risk area travellors and risk area travellors, and people flying from risk areas in the middle east especially, who mainly transit in Istanbul, not getting tested as per a German-Turkish arrangement where those arriving from Turkey get tested already in Turkey, but nobody thought about transit passengers. So it's a shambles.

How the Quarantine is supposed to work and be enforced better, especially with those arriving from the Balkans, is completely unclear to me (just look the problems Austria is having), but whatever. Some politicans have called to just outright make it a offense to travel to high risk countries, and maybe that will work, idk. But honestly it is a completely useless discussion, and in my opinion a highly racist one as well, as long as 100km from where I live there is a Country recording 5000 Cases daily, and noone is even considering closing the Border to them or declaring any high risk areas there.

[Silent Hunter]

France has gotten that bad? Wow.

[urutzizu]

France has gotten that bad? Wow.

Well they are testing more. Unlike in many other Countries, as far as I understand until end of July you still needed a prescription to get tested, and now it is free of change for everybody, and as a consequence testing rates have gone up. But that is clearly not the only reason, the Virus is clearly spreading much faster. Apparently my timing was on point because Paris and Côte d’Azur have just been designated high-risk areas.

[palandio]

Yeah, they will replace it with 14 days of quarantine again with the possibility of release after five days if you can show a negative pcr.

14 days is long imho, most people are not very infectious anymore after 8-9 days. I think that measures should be as easy as reasonably possible and only as strict as absolutely necessary. Compliance with a longer quarantine will probably be not as good as with a shorter one.

[...] they are free, which seemingly has encouraged people to travel into high risk areas at tax payers expense, which has been very controversial in Germany. However it was probably necessary, because while you could probably force people flying to high risk areas to pay for it as part of the flight ticket or something, if you force people to pay, those entering by road, especially those visiting family in Romania/Balkans, which are the highest risk group, will avoid getting tested as enforcement is near to impossible there.

I fully agree.

In addition it seems as if it is not as safe as made out to be, with Immediate Tests after arriving missing infections that happened within the few days before flying back, giving people a false sense of safety to return to work (whence why many employers including my own are banning people coming back from say Turkey from working until 14 Days have passed even if they have a negative test.).

Ideally people would quarantine for ca. three days and then get another test, but with current testing capacities that's impossible. Maybe it would be better to not test immediately, but only after three days of quarantine. Or not test at all and directly go for a (shortened) quarantine. Keep in mind though that in the current situation it is impossible to prevent all transmission chains anyway.

In addition the enforcement even at airports has been mired with trouble with potentially infected returnees standing for hours next to each other in huge lines, even people who wanted to be tested on their own accord not being able to actually find the testing center, and those that didn't presumably just walking out of the Airport as there are basically no controls. Also lots of mixing between non-risk area travellors and risk area travellors, and people flying from risk areas in the middle east especially, who mainly transit in Istanbul, not getting tested as per a German-Turkish arrangement where those arriving from Turkey get tested already in Turkey, but nobody thought about transit passengers. So it's a shambles.

The situation is certainly unsettling. Unless there is some reporting delay numbers in NRW seen to have peaked though and we can hope for other Länder that numbers will stop to increase some days after the end of the holidays. Unless the situation gets out of control before, of course, which cannot be excluded.

How the Quarantine is supposed to work and be enforced better, especially with those arriving from the Balkans, is completely unclear to me (just look the problems Austria is having), but whatever. Some politicans have called to just outright make it a offense to travel to high risk countries, and maybe that will work, idk. But honestly it is a completely useless discussion, and in my opinion a highly racist one as well, as long as 100km from where I live there is a Country recording 5000 Cases daily, and noone is even considering closing the Border to them or declaring any high risk areas there.

What discussion is racist in your opinion?

That the recent increase in cases is mostly due to imported cases and sparked transmission chains?
That's just a fact.

Making it an offense to travel to high risk countries?
I agree that making it an offense is wrong. The right of movement is a high good, even more for people who want to visit their family.

That people distinguish between "classical tourism" and "ethnic family-related travelling"?
Yes, that discussion has some very unfortunate undertones. Although it cannot be denied that currently many infections come from people visiting their families abroad. But as I said I don't blame people for visiting their families.

That some countries are designated high-risk areas and others are not?
Well, it seems logical that you would first designate those places high-risk areas from which the most cases are imported. (Btw I think that in March South Tyrol and Tyrol should have be designated high-risk much earlier, with mandatory quarantine for returnees. Would have saved us a lot of trouble. Just to bring a "classical tourism" example.)

[urutzizu]

What discussion is racist in your opinion?
That some countries are designated high-risk areas and others are not?
Well, it seems logical that you would first designate those places high-risk areas from which the most cases are imported. (Btw I think that in March South Tyrol and Tyrol should have be designated high-risk much earlier, with mandatory quarantine for returnees. Would have saved us a lot of trouble. Just to bring a "classical tourism" example.)

In my opinion it does not make sense to do it that way. Because, then what happens is what you have now, where people arriving from Turkey/Balkans/everywhere else have to test, consequentially you find a ton of cases, including the asymptomatic, imported from those areas, while Tourists from France, Greece or other European Countries and until recently Spain, are not tested, and as such the only time they turn up in the statistics as imported cases is if they do a voluntary test after they get home (which only the kind do who are anyway very careful about the Virus on holiday), or have corona symptoms and then get tested and are positive and tell the Health Authority that they traveled to (X).
Therefore the statistics on imported Cases will always disfavor the countries that were "high-risk" from the start, and have always been so since mandatory testing was established. Even before that most imported cases were from those countries, yes, but also that was before the second waves in most European countries had really taken off. It doesn't make sense that people visiting their families, are that much more at risk then Partytourists from places like Spain, Croatia or Bulgaria, and it completely contradicts things we learned in the first wave about Ischgl vis a vis say Chinese students coming back from visiting their families for lunar new year or the Iranian diaspora.
Ultimately we will only know more about this when the RKI releases new numbers on imported cases, which include the mandatory testing of arrivals from Spain. But until then the focus on family travel, and the lax approach to tourism does not seem epidemiologically sensible to me and feels racially biased.  

[palandio]

What discussion is racist in your opinion?
That some countries are designated high-risk areas and others are not?
Well, it seems logical that you would first designate those places high-risk areas from which the most cases are imported. (Btw I think that in March South Tyrol and Tyrol should have be designated high-risk much earlier, with mandatory quarantine for returnees. Would have saved us a lot of trouble. Just to bring a "classical tourism" example.)

In my opinion it does not make sense to do it that way. Because, then what happens is what you have now, where people arriving from Turkey/Balkans/everywhere else have to test, consequentially you find a ton of cases, including the asymptomatic, imported from those areas, while Tourists from France, Greece or other European Countries and until recently Spain, are not tested, and as such the only time they turn up in the statistics as imported cases is if they do a voluntary test after they get home (which only the kind do who are anyway very careful about the Virus on holiday), or have corona symptoms and then get tested and are positive and tell the Health Authority that they traveled to (X).
Therefore the statistics on imported Cases will always disfavor the countries that were "high-risk" from the start, and have always been so since mandatory testing was established. Even before that most imported cases were from those countries, yes, but also that was before the second waves in most European countries had really taken off. It doesn't make sense that people visiting their families, are that much more at risk then Partytourists from places like Spain, Croatia or Bulgaria, and it completely contradicts things we learned in the first wave about Ischgl vis a vis say Chinese students coming back from visiting their families for lunar new year or the Iranian diaspora.
Ultimately we will only know more about this when the RKI releases new numbers on imported cases, which include the mandatory testing of arrivals from Spain. But until then the focus on family travel, and the lax approach to tourism does not seem epidemiologically sensible to me and feels racially biased.  

Given mandatory testing for returnees from "high-risk areas" we have a comparatively good picture of the risk of importing infections from there. And as long as a significant percentage of people coming from an area tests positive I think that it doesn't make sense to scrap the area from the "high-risk" list.

The more difficult question regards areas that are not (yet) considered "high-risk". I hope that the RKI has more sophisticated means to determine "high-risk" than to just add up some absolute numbers. I could be wrong.

Some last points regarding "party tourism" etc.: My impression is that at the moment many people feel that partying is somehow morally wrong, others blame people from the diaspora for attending family festivities in their countries of origin. With a bit of hyperbole you could say that according to a widespread opinion COVID-19 develops out of nowhere when people are partying as a divine punishment like in the 80s when (gay) sex supposedly caused AIDS. Well, it's not that way, as long as noone involved is infected, nothing happens. The justified objection is of course that it's difficult to make sure that really noone attending a big party is infected. And if someone is infected, then a place like Ischgl (or Mallorca's Ballermann 6 or similar places on the Croatian or Bulgarian coast) can become a COVID-19 hotspot within days, even if it wasn't so far, much faster than in small-town Kosovo. I think that it's difficult to factor in things like "Mallorca is a typical party destination, hence the risk that it has become a new hotspot within days is higher". You would end up with a lot of hiking tourists unnecessarily occupying testing capacities. And I think that for places which have low numbers and which are not typically associated with risky behavior it makes sense to keep them from the high-risk list.

[Tender Branson]

Active cases in my district have dropped from 18 to 10, because no new cases for a few days now and 8 recoveries.

Still, 350+ new cases Austria-wide yesterday.

[Middle-aged Europe]

In a controversial move, Berlin has decided to ban large-scale anti-restrictions/lockdown/vaccination protests planned for this weekened. The reason for the ban is that the last time such protests happened nobody was wearing a mask or practicing physical distancing there. It is considered controversial because an increasingly radical anti-restrictions/lockdown/vaccination scene is considering Germany to be a totalitarian dictatorship akin to the 1933-1945 Nazi regime due to the anti-COVID restrictions and the protest ban may be regarded by them as proving their point.

Depending on their grade of radicalization, various representatives of the anti-restrictions/lockdown/vaccination scene have either announced to a) challenge the ban in court, b) ignore the ban altogether and go protesting no matter what or bc) arm themselves and prepare for the "Battle for Berlin" (the latter announcements only happened online, of course). I  guess this Saturday practically anything could happen, from basically nothing to riots in the streets. Have fun.

[Tender Branson]

This is clearly unconstitutional.

I hope the German high court throws out the ban.

Those restrictions are getting really annoying anyway. The only places where masks should be worn right now should only be medical areas such as docs, hospitals, pharmacies and retirement/care homes.

All other areas, especially all public areas except the ones above (supermarkets, schools, sports venues etc.), should all be mask-free.

[Middle-aged Europe]

This is clearly unconstitutional.

Not necessarily, since some legal experts say that it is in fact constitutional given there have always been some leeway for authorities to ban assemblies and protests under specific circimstances and that legally speaking there may be reasonable cause for such a measure here. Most criticism therefore focuses on the aspect that politically speaking it is not a very smart move to make. The latter might in fact also serve as reason for striking down the ban, since Berlin's interior minister Andreas Geisel perhaps made the mistake of mixing legal and political justificiations in explaining the ban yesterday therefore giving the impression that it isn't entirely based on legal grounds.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Giving rising infection numbers in Berlin, the German federal and state governments are planning to pass country-wide coronavirus restrictions for the first time since early June. The federal government's proposal amounts to:

- Private parties are restricted to a maximum of 25 attendees, non-private events to 50 attendees.

- The ban on large-scale events like festivals and larger concerts is extended until December 31.

- Violations of mask-wearing rules are fined with a minimum of 50 Euros.

- Any still existing Corona restrictions are kept in place for now and won't be lifted further.

These proposals are in parts already in place in some German states, but not nearly all of them. So, the idea is to extend them to the entire country.

[Mike88]

Portugal update: After September 15, new restrictive measures will be implemented to manage the new school year, people going back to offices and bad forecasts.

https://twitter.com/expresso/status/1298991802389692417

Country in contingent mode after of September 15. Worsening forecast imposes new measures

The experience abroad - and the figures from this Thursday - show that an aggravation of the pandemic situation in Portugal may be on the horizon very soon. The Government guarantees that it is keeping an eye on the epidemiological situation and that is why it has already decided that there will be an increase in the country's state of readiness, to the state of contingency, as of September 15. The goal is to have the support to take new measures and “prepare for autumn / winter”.

What measures will result from this new situation are not yet known. Beyond borders, there are countries imposing mandatory masks or a ban on smoking in public space. Here, the Government has not yet decided on the measures, which should be announced in the week prior to the country's entry into contingency, that is, in the Council of Ministers of 8 September. Before, technicians and politicians will resume the famous meetings at Infarmed headquarters, on September 7, to discuss the conditions to fight the pandemic, with new rules (the initial exposure of the technicians will be open to the media).

(...)

[Middle-aged Europe]

Giving rising infection numbers in Berlin, the German federal and state governments are planning to pass country-wide coronavirus restrictions for the first time since early June. The federal government's proposal amounts to:

- Private parties are restricted to a maximum of 25 attendees, non-private events to 50 attendees.

- The ban on large-scale events like festivals and larger concerts is extended until December 31.

- Violations of mask-wearing rules are fined with a minimum of 50 Euros.

- Any still existing Corona restrictions are kept in place for now and won't be lifted further.

These proposals are in parts already in place in some German states, but not nearly all of them. So, the idea is to extend them to the entire country.

What the federal government and the states could ultimately agree upon out of these proposals were:

- Fines for not wearing masks when mandated (although Saxony-Anhalt chose to opt out of that today)

- Large-scale events remain banned until the end of the year.

Did I already mention that when it comes to coronavirus Germany resembles the EU?

[Tender Branson]

Sturm Graz will allow 7.300 fans into their stadium ("Merkur-Arena") tomorrow, in their opening match of the new Cup season against Innsbruck:

https://steiermark.orf.at/stories/3064029/

This is in violation of Austrian rules, which only allow 1.250 fans until August 31 (but starting on September 1, about 10.000 will be allowed in football stadiums again).

They could still go ahead with the 7.300 fans, because of their security concept which broke apart their stadium into various different sectors that are sealed off from each other, fans need to wear masks, sit far apart from each other and register at an app for possible contact tracing later on.

[President Johnson]

Situation in Europe continues to get worse. France reporting over 6,000 cases in the past 24 hours. Germany again has hit 1,500. Not good.