re: Daily COVID Updated as of 11/2/20 8:00 PM

Is this chart updated daily somewhere?

Let’s be honest, that was going to be the case regardless with a country our size. I think that is mostly what has happened in Europe. I don’t think any measures that have been taken were enough to truly make a big impact of the spread. Europe is just so much more densely populated that it was able to burn through everything much quicker. If you look at the new case maps, it’s clear most of what is happening now is just the continual spread of a virus over a much larger land mass. It has mostly burned through the northeast already.

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truly flatten it, 

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What does "truly flatten it" mean? A truly flat curve is a contradiction in terms.

It's obviously and relative.

And relative to what? The justification was give hospitals time to prepare/recover and remain open for non-COVID emergencies and essential care.

We did that. Almost immediately, and it was never even an issue in 99% of our population centers.

There are marketed coronavirus vaccines for dogs and cats. They work fine and our immunology is similar enough. What’s more, a phase 2 trial for a COVID vaccine was published last week and if that one doesn’t work out, there are plenty more targets. Mitigation vs. suppression seems similar economically, so why not suppress?

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Mitigation vs. suppression seems similar economically, so why not suppress?

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I'm not sure how you're quantifying any of that.

And your description of a hopeful vaccine (that's effective, safe and distributed) is sadly amusing. It's almost as though you were sarcastically making my point.

How'd we go from flatten curve for 15 days to avoid overwhelmed hospitals, to suppress the virus indefinitely while we wait for a doggie or kitty vaccine to hopefully work well in humans, meanwhile Rome burns and Fauci Fiddles?

For frick's sake man. This is truly insane.

Do you think the balkans could be next hotspot?

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Sweden was the only European country without a GDP loss in Q1. The projection of their losses are significantly less as a percentage than other countries that shut down.

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It’s not as promising of a picture as the top line would suggest:

1. Sweden’s 2019 GDP growth of 1.2% was one of the lowest in Europe and below the 1.6% growth for the continent as a whole (also behind Europe in previous 2 years) as well as the 2.3% growth in the US and the 1.7% growth of advanced economies.

Improving, and just barely, upon an underperforming year (3 years in fact) with a lower baseline makes it less impressive. As a comparison, Sweden’s growth from Q1 2019 to Q1 2020 was 0.4% while the USA’s was 0.2%.

2. The net impact of the 2 most volatile components of GDP, inventories (-0.5%) and net exports (+1.6%) was +1.1%. These components can make quarterly results deceiving and can make one quarter look especially good or bad and the next look the opposite. For comparison, if you removed these, the USA and Sweden would have had an almost identical GDP change (about 1% non-annualized).

3. The economist consensus before Sweden reported results was actually an increase of 0.6%, so they underperformed the projection.

4. Sweden is still projected to have a worse over all year (-6.8%) than Europe (-6.7%), advanced economies (-6.1%), and the USA (-5.9%). Considering the components that contributed to the Q1 increase and the underperformance relative to the predictions, it does seem quite reasonable that Sweden will do as bad or even worse did the whole year.

I don't know all the reasons, but the ones I've seen cited by the health experts are apolitical/bipartisan/multipartisan leadership and distancing policies (with some places like Portugal mandating mask-wearing relatively early) and disease monitoring. The apolitical approach to public health has to be emphasized because the public has a limited reservoir of trust and competing & politicized messages lead to confusion & health clusterfricks.

But when the leaders of the various parties publicly show solidarity behind the health ministry's approach or take responsibility for its failures and make promises for improvement, good things can happen. With this kind of leadership, the public was able to handle the messages to keep distancing, put up with mandates, and as the data has looked relatively good compared to places like the US and Latin America where medical populism approaches are failing or struggling, Europe is proud of themselves & willing to keep following leadership. They're inching open (e.g. the Louvre opened just last week) with lots of ongoing restrictions, but they're generally on track for school openings for fall. In general, it's a sad commentary on our situation that we started out with travel restrictions to Europe and at this point they're keeping us out because we've got so many cases.

Europe doing better because they don't have all the fatties we do.