Category: health care Page 17 of 35

A little delayed, but here it is.

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Our benefactor writes:

Well, we crossed the symbolic threshold of 60,000 deaths before May 1. I’m not sure why it is symbolic, other than that earlier predictions were 60,000 deaths by the end of August. People are beginning to realize that this is an enduring pandemic and preparing themselves for the long haul. It’s going to be a huge challenge for the world. From what I understand, this is not quickly dissipating.

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Our benefactor writes:

Well, we’ve crossed the one million cases threshold, with estimates of 3x to 5x that number of actual cases in the population. We’re about to cross the 60 thousand deaths threshold. NYC’s recent restating of their deaths upwards by over 30 percent to 40 percent due to analysis of normal death rates this time of year is also indicative of under-counting.

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Our benefactor writes:

A couple more days in this direction, and we may actually have progress. The current doubling rate would get us to two million cases and 120 thousand deaths by the end of May. Hopefully, that does not happen.

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One thing Covid-19 has done is allow us to rank a lot of governments by competence. There’s a lot of governments in the running for most incompetent. The UK and the US are up there, and if Sweden’s experiment doesn’t work, they may take the crown.

Probably the most competent government in the world is Vietnam. They managed to keep deaths to zero despite being right next to China and having massive economic ties. They jumped right on top of it, tested, traced, isolated and quarantined. They made sure people isolating had food (heck, they installed rich machines which gave rice for free).

This tracks what I’ve heard from ex-pats: Vietnam is a country where things get done, and that its cities are among the most dynamic in the world. Vietnam still has the sense that there’s a task, and you don’t put profit before that task. So they are able to build infrastructure and complete goals with stunning rapidity and minimal, by our standards, waste.

Was a time, of course, when the UK was like that (in the mid to 19th century British efficiency was often commented upon). Not so long ago Japan was like this, but they’ve lost it at the top, though the rot hasn’t gone all the way through the entire society yet.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, New Zealand and Australia have performed well. Canada’s performance, while good compared to the UK and the US (not even faint praise), was delayed. I was somewhat surprised by Australia’s performance, but I guess they can still be competent when it doesn’t touch on their corrupt resource extraction industry, as was the case during the wildfires (which is, in itself, interesting information).

The keys to good performance were acting early, testing and tracing contacts, and doing isolation properly: Quarantine away from your family.

The key to fixing this is going to be widespread testing, contact tracing, and then proper quarantine, which means you have to support the people in quarantine and make it mandatory.

Tracing is slow work. It can take five days to trace one person’s contacts. That means, if you’ve let things get out of control, you need a large number of people. Oddly, in the US, millions of people now need work and hey, it can be done from home: It’s phone work.

So competence means ramping up testing as fast as possible. It means distributing masks to everyone, free of charge. It means tracing, tracking and quarantining.

Until these things are done, releasing restrictions after a drop in cases will just lead to another spike in a few weeks.

Truly competent governments got ahead of this: They didn’t need an army of tracers.

But those who didn’t, do.

Let us hope our governments can, at least, learn from their mistakes.

The alternative is a year and a half of waves of cases, isolation, and more waves. In the US, with its refusal to support individuals and small companies, that means widespread hunger. And, as the food system is impacted in many countries, along with logistics, there is likely to be famine in other areas (for example, India, which has very low margins).

Few readers thought they might want to live in Vietnam, I suspect.

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Our benefactor notes a significant drop in deaths. New Jersey reported no new deaths since yesterday, which is odd.

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Our benefactor notes that deaths will definitely 60k by the end of April.

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There will be no Covid data post tomorrow, Sunday will cover both Saturday and Sunday.

Our benefactor writes:

New cases holding steady despite a restating downwards of NYC cases. Definitely going to make it to 60k deaths by April 30 at this rate.

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