How Iceland 'Virtually Eliminated' Its Coronavirus Cases (newyorker.com) 157
Iceland is the most sparsely-populated country in Europe, with a population of 364,134 spread across 40,000 square miles (103,000 square kilometers). But the New Yorker notes Iceland has "virtually eliminated" Covid-19 cases -- and tries to explore how they did it.
By February 28th, Iceland had already implemented a contact-tracing team. "And then, two hours later, we got the call," remembers a detective with the Reykjavík police department. A man who'd recently been skiing in the Dolomites had become the country's first known coronavirus patient... Anyone who'd spent more than fifteen minutes near the man in the days before he'd experienced his first symptoms was considered potentially infected. ("Near" was defined as within a radius of two metres, or just over six feet.) The team came up with a list of fifty-six names. By midnight, all fifty-six contacts had been located and ordered to quarantine themselves for fourteen days.
The first case was followed by three more cases, then by six, and then by an onslaught. By mid-March, confirmed COVID cases in Iceland were increasing at a rate of sixty, seventy, even a hundred a day. As a proportion of the country's population, this was far faster than the rate at which cases in the United States were growing. The number of people the tracing team was tracking down, meanwhile, was rising even more quickly. An infected person might have been near five other people, or fifty-six, or more. One young woman was so active before she tested positive — going to classes, rehearsing a play, attending choir practice — that her contacts numbered close to two hundred. All were sent into quarantine.
The tracing team, too, kept growing, until it had fifty-two members. They worked in shifts out of conference rooms in a Reykjavík hotel that had closed for lack of tourists. To find people who had been exposed, team members scanned airplane manifests and security-camera footage. They tried to pinpoint who was sitting next to whom on buses and in lecture halls. One man who fell ill had recently attended a concert. The only person he remembered having had contact with while there was his wife. But the tracing team did some sleuthing and found that after the concert there had been a reception. "In this gathering, people were hugging, and eating from the same trays," Pálmason told me. "So the decision was made — all of them go into quarantine." If you were returning to Iceland from overseas, you also got a call: put yourself in quarantine. At the same time, the country was aggressively testing for the virus — on a per-capita basis, at the highest rate in the world...
[B]y mid-May, when I went to talk to Pálmason, the tracing team had almost no one left to track. During the previous week, in all of Iceland, only two new coronavirus cases had been confirmed. The country hadn't just managed to flatten the curve; it had, it seemed, virtually eliminated it.
A biotech firm called deCODE Genetics (owned by the American multinational biopharmaceutical company Amgen) also offered its own facilities for screening tests, which "picked up many cases that otherwise would have been missed," according to the article. "These cases, too, were referred to the tracing team. By May 17th, Iceland had tested 15.5 per cent of its population for the virus." Meanwhile, deCODE was also sequencing the virus from every Icelander whose test had come back positive. As the virus is passed from person to person, it picks up random mutations. By analyzing these, geneticists can map the disease's spread...
[R]esearchers at deCODE found that, while attention had been focussed on Italy, the virus had been quietly slipping into the country from several other nations, including Britain. Travellers from the West Coast of the U.S. had brought in one strain, and travellers from the East Coast another. The East Coast strain had been imported to America from Italy or Austria, then exported back to Europe.
By February 28th, Iceland had already implemented a contact-tracing team. "And then, two hours later, we got the call," remembers a detective with the Reykjavík police department. A man who'd recently been skiing in the Dolomites had become the country's first known coronavirus patient... Anyone who'd spent more than fifteen minutes near the man in the days before he'd experienced his first symptoms was considered potentially infected. ("Near" was defined as within a radius of two metres, or just over six feet.) The team came up with a list of fifty-six names. By midnight, all fifty-six contacts had been located and ordered to quarantine themselves for fourteen days.
The first case was followed by three more cases, then by six, and then by an onslaught. By mid-March, confirmed COVID cases in Iceland were increasing at a rate of sixty, seventy, even a hundred a day. As a proportion of the country's population, this was far faster than the rate at which cases in the United States were growing. The number of people the tracing team was tracking down, meanwhile, was rising even more quickly. An infected person might have been near five other people, or fifty-six, or more. One young woman was so active before she tested positive — going to classes, rehearsing a play, attending choir practice — that her contacts numbered close to two hundred. All were sent into quarantine.
The tracing team, too, kept growing, until it had fifty-two members. They worked in shifts out of conference rooms in a Reykjavík hotel that had closed for lack of tourists. To find people who had been exposed, team members scanned airplane manifests and security-camera footage. They tried to pinpoint who was sitting next to whom on buses and in lecture halls. One man who fell ill had recently attended a concert. The only person he remembered having had contact with while there was his wife. But the tracing team did some sleuthing and found that after the concert there had been a reception. "In this gathering, people were hugging, and eating from the same trays," Pálmason told me. "So the decision was made — all of them go into quarantine." If you were returning to Iceland from overseas, you also got a call: put yourself in quarantine. At the same time, the country was aggressively testing for the virus — on a per-capita basis, at the highest rate in the world...
[B]y mid-May, when I went to talk to Pálmason, the tracing team had almost no one left to track. During the previous week, in all of Iceland, only two new coronavirus cases had been confirmed. The country hadn't just managed to flatten the curve; it had, it seemed, virtually eliminated it.
A biotech firm called deCODE Genetics (owned by the American multinational biopharmaceutical company Amgen) also offered its own facilities for screening tests, which "picked up many cases that otherwise would have been missed," according to the article. "These cases, too, were referred to the tracing team. By May 17th, Iceland had tested 15.5 per cent of its population for the virus." Meanwhile, deCODE was also sequencing the virus from every Icelander whose test had come back positive. As the virus is passed from person to person, it picks up random mutations. By analyzing these, geneticists can map the disease's spread...
[R]esearchers at deCODE found that, while attention had been focussed on Italy, the virus had been quietly slipping into the country from several other nations, including Britain. Travellers from the West Coast of the U.S. had brought in one strain, and travellers from the East Coast another. The East Coast strain had been imported to America from Italy or Austria, then exported back to Europe.
Great Leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
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And more proof that track and trace is the best and maybe only solution to this. I don't think any country has really got back to some kind of normality without track and trace, except perhaps Japan.
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I'm increasingly leaning towards test and trace being top of the list in terms of control effectiveness. You look at the impacts of lockdown lifting [twimg.com] (graph as of 28 May - trends continue since then) and they seemingly have no impact on the rate of spread. But obviously something happened to change the disease from one that spreads like wildfire to one that just keeps dying off. Since lockdown policies don't seem to have been when did it, that leaves:
* Test and trace
* Personal behavioral c
Re: Great Leadership (Score:1)
becoming immune
I have it on good authority that covid is the magickal virus that disobeys the laws of biophysics; our bodies can't develop immunity to it.
We need to hurry up with a vaccine so that our bodies can develop immunity to it.
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I have it on good authority that covid is the magickal virus that disobeys the laws of biophysics; our bodies can't develop immunity to it.
This is actually one of my favorite examples of misleading headlines versus scientists using cautious language in this whole pandemic. Basically, scientists saying that we don't have in-depth long-term studies analyzing the immunity characteristics of how people react to this virus (a reasonable claim) got simplified as "We don't have proof that getting it gives you immunity" which was then sensationalized as "OMG! You may not be immune if you recover from COVID-19! Chaos and panic!"
(In practically every ot
Re:Great Leadership (Score:4)
* Test and trace
* Personal behavioral changes (but then again, there's not been big spikes in places where people's social distancing since lockdown lifting has been... let's say "subpar". But at least the changes in part of the population could have an impact)
* Warmer, sunnier weather (but then again, the change from "crazy infectious" to "dying out" doesn't seem to follow local weather trends. But it probably helps)
* Superspreaders - those who interact with many people, and are thus most likely to get infected and infect many others - becoming immune
You missed:
People wearing facemasks everywhere.
Half the seats taped off on public transport
No cinemas/theaters/crowded bars.
etc.
All those things are still in force (around here at least)
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It's also interesting to see how even in uncontrolled environments, you don't tend to get the 90+% infection rates that were feared. The worst two rates in studies have been an Ohio prison outbreak (an unnatural situation) and one particularly bad town in Italy, both at ~70% of the population.
You keep mentioning that, but I have no idea why you think it's important. 70% of a country infected isn't a great result.....
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They're noteworthy in that they're the extreme exceptions. One of which is an entirely artificial environment.
The "extreme exceptions" are only 70%. Normal "bad cases" are generally 20s or 30s.
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And more proof that track and trace is the best and maybe only solution to this. I don't think any country has really got back to some kind of normality without track and trace, except perhaps Japan.
Quoted for insurance visibility, though I don't even see what attracted the troll moderators to your comment.
I think it's a bit early to say regarding Japan. However, if the Japanese are succeeding then it might be because of special skills in wearing masks or an aptitude for social distancing.
Also, it still looks like Xi's solution of arresting everyone worked pretty effectively. Not that I like it, but mostly it makes me wonder what the rest of the world was thinking at the time. "Xi is just acting out."
Return on Investment from Slashdot 2020? (Score:2)
I don't know. It's just so hard to believe that Slashdot 2020 would be worth the actual money, even for training purposes. Especially considering that Slashdot has become such a soft target. However I can imagine Slashdot experience as a recruiting filter of some sort leading to paid trolling. AKA "professional social influencer". Gotta keep up with the lingo, eh?
I think what bugs me is the lack of imagination and originality. Is it really impossible for them to come up with anything new or interesting? Or
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Well it means a lot to me, even with all the trolls and the far right mob and all the rest. Maybe I've just been here too long.
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Actually I did imagine one reason why serious or even paid trolls and astroturfers might be active on Slashdot 2020. It's possible that what happens on Slashdot doesn't stay on Slashdot, but that it's a leading indicator of some sort for effective propaganda they can then use in more significant venues. You have noticed that a lot of the time it feels like they are quite like monkeys throwing random shite around just to see what sticks? Slashdot is a rather "responsive" system in some ways, largely since it
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Err, New Zealand, population of 5 million have eliminated community transmission.
Looks like we'll be dropping to our lowest alert level this week as well, which means no restrictions on anything.
Things are basically back to normal here already, apart from strict border control of course!
Greatest day was when the kids went back to school a few week ago and the pubs reopened (with social distancing table service).
Been 16 days with no new cases now. Last community transmission was over a month ago.
Happy days!
Re: Great Leadership (Score:2, Informative)
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Iceland has 364,134 people in it. My city barely has that many.
Any comparisons to Iceland for 80% of Western nations with regards to tracing and other actions is merely a display if ignorance, butt hurt, and stupidity.
These excuses seem to be everywhere and are pathetic. Sure, Iceland has only 364,134 people, but that means that they only have 364,134 people to choose from to do contact tracing. If your country has 300million people; 1000 times the size of Iceland, you don't even have to scale up to 1000 times as many contact tracers because the infection takes longer to move through a big population. Starting with only 100 times the number of contact tracers they used, something you can easily afford without stopping
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Basically all people on Icelands live in one single city.
The scale is exactly the same as if you would trace NYC. You just need more people completely proportional to the population size.
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China? Excuse me but you can not put China on any lists for anything other than "fucking liars".
If China's figures were as badly manipulated as the figures in the UK or the USA then we would be able to see extra genetic diversity in the viruses coming out of there. Also, the number of Chinese people that would be known to people in the west and would have died would make it obvious. The only reason I can see that people are claiming that China is lying about this on a large scale seems to be that some of the populist right wing governments like Trump's government in the USA and the Conservatives in t
Re: Great Leadership (Score:2)
I was going to argue this but it's kind of true. The island's population is mostly around one city. Even if they weren't, they have very ideal conditions to see who has entered their borders.
There aren't many population densities in the world that have that kind of edge control for a city; let alone a country. For the rest of us, it's a much more dense setup with many more unknown edge factors coming and going.
If this was tried else where, the infection graph would look bumpy till a good, evenly spread maj
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And let's not forget New Zealand (several islands with a population of 5 million) which now has just one active case and has gone 15 days without any new cases being reported. So long as the borders remain closed it looks as if NZ has licked the virus through a very firm and rapid response right from the get-go.
As a result, the internal economy of NZ is well-placed to recover in a comparatively short timeframe... although the tourism industry is pretty stuffed, since that was reliant on international visit
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Actually, it's 16 days no cases :-)
Approx half of NZ tourism is from domestic travelers, approx half of international tourism comes from Australia (which we'll hopefully have a bubble with soon). I imagine majority of Kiwi's wanting to holiday overseas this year will instead holiday domestically instead. I know I've booked in more domestic holidays already this year.
6% of NZ GDP is tourism. 20% of NZ export is tourism.
So it's possibly not all doom and gloom for NZ tourism, however it's obviously not happy d
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It's now official. New Zealand is now free of Covid19 as of today [nzherald.co.nz] with the last remaining case ticked off as recovered.
Checkout the Worldometer CV19 table [worldometers.info], which can be sorted by deaths per pop of 1M.
Iceland at #57. NZ at #128.
Now it isn't really a fair comparison because there is one factor that is being ignored in the "who's done a better job" arguments.
NZ and Australia got CV19 at their summer's end. Iceland was coming out of its usual deep freeze winter.
There's been recent scientific and medical specula
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bloody fantastic news alright! :-)
Now we're at our lowest alert level, life essentially back to normal now (apart from the border).
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It's now official. New Zealand is now free of Covid19 as of today [nzherald.co.nz] with the last remaining case ticked off as recovered.
Brazil will soon be free of Covid19 as well, they're stopped reporting figures and once the remaining active cases die off they'll have zero Covid19 cases left. Messias delivers the miracle, and the little flu is conquered.
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Hawaii is another example.
Oahu has a few cases, but all the other islands are now covid-free.
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Iceland has 364,134 people in it. My city barely has that many.
Yep, social distancing is the norm in Iceland.
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Re: Great Leadership (Score:2)
Because that doesn't fit your ideology and agenda?
Instead of telling us we're all gunna die maybe you could behave like a real human being would: congratulate us on our good fortune and wish us well going forward.
Is that so hard?
Re:Great Leadership (Score:5, Insightful)
Britain is "a fucking Island" too. How well did things go there? Fourth highest per-capita death rate on Earth (second highest that's not a microstate). Also "fucking islands" are Ireland, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Sint Maarten, and Montserat. Six of the worst 20 locations on the Worldometer COVID tracker in terms of deaths per 1M population are islands.
What sort of stone-age planet do you think we live in where oceans are impenetrable barriers that nobody travels across? Living on an island just means that people arrive and leave by boat or plane rather than by car. They still arrive and leave. Indeed, islands tend to be A) more dependent on trade with other parts of the world, not less; and B) have tourism (a major disease vector) as a major part of their economy.
Re: Great Leadership (Score:1, Funny)
How well did things go there? Fourth highest per-capita death rate on Eart
And it's no wonder; bunch of pasty, pale Yorkshire pudding-eating fucks, the lot of 'em.
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How dare you! We've had a very sunny month, many of us are glowing a healthy red now.
Re:Great Leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not saying leadership decisions didn't help Iceland (or that they didn't hurt the US), but population density plays a really large factor when it comes to dealing with the spread of disease:
"New York has the highest population density of any major city in the United States, with over 27,000 people per square mile."
"Reykjavík and its surrounding areas make up the largest urban area in the country. Population density is more concentrated here, with an average of 1,100 inhabitants per square mile."
Solutions that have a reasonable chance of working well in sparsely populated areas like Iceland would be much more likely to fall flat on their face in more densely populated areas. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that these solutions would be a lot more impressive if they could be proven to work in an area with a population density 20+ times higher.
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Was this article about Hong Kong? What about the post I was replying to? Did Hong Kong use the same solution Iceland did? Do they have the same kind of government?
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It's funny how so many countries first said that the disease won't spread in their country because of some reason, so no reason to do anything. Then the (possibly) same people are finding excuses why any of the solutions used in other countries wouldn't work in theirs. The management of the COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing failure. We should all just learn from the South-West Asian countries as they seem mostly to know how to handle this.
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California takes up about 60% of the western coastline of the contiguous 48 states; statements about the weather in Los Angeles and San Diego bear little resemblance to the weather in San Francisco and Oakland.
New York and New Jersey may have already used up their pool of extremely vulnerable and exposed people. I don't believe it, but it is a workable hypothesis.
Re:Great Leadership (Score:5, Informative)
This is grossly misleading. Reykjavíkingar don't live only "1100 people per square mile". Reykjavík has a perfectly normal density for a European city of its size [wikimedia.org]. Similar to heavily-infected Bergamo [luxeadvent...aveler.com], for example.
The "population density" figure is low due to the fact that Reykjavík owns vast tracts of unihabited land [wikimedia.org] in the countryside surrouding the city. How much empty land you own obviously has zero impact on how fast a disease spreads where people actually live. If New York City did a major landfill project in its surrounding waters, and doubled its area, but didn't settle anyone there, that would halve its population density. Would that have an impact on its disease transmission rate? Of course not.
Lastly, if the argument is about density, are you seriously saying that cities like Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei are "low density"?
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For comparison to the above map of the land that Reykjavík owns, here's a satellite image [google.com]. Large chunks of it are literally uninhabitable mountains and lava flows.
High population density is 1,2,3,4, and 5, particularly northern 1, 2 and 3 and western 4. Moderate population density is 6, 7, and 8. 10 is semi-rural. 9 (the huge district in the north, nearly as big as the rest combined) is rural. The rest (the majority of the map, many times larger than the urban areas) owned by Reykjavík is hinterl
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"average of 1,100 inhabitants per square mile" - Having never been to Reykjavik, I did not come up with that statistic. I wouldn't consider any "average" population density statistic to be worth anything at all unless it averaged samplings from various neighborhoods. It makes no sense at all to include vast uninhabited tracts of land in a density statistic. If I quoted such a weak statistic, it was unintentional. The fact that it's close to the average population density of Jacksonville FL (a fairly large c
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Re: Great Leadership (Score:1)
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Leadership is important. So is a trustworthy government (not quite the same). Track and trace is also extremely important. And so is having secure borders (which being an island really helps).
They were luck, they had competent leadership, they used the correct approach, and they had immediately secured borders. Probably a few other things I've missed. Being sparsely populated helps a lot, of course, but without the rest it wouldn't have sufficed.
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Do you want to mess with Thor? Because I don't.
We got stuck with Loki.
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Also, they're an island (Score:2)
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Just a little easier to secure your borders and test ALL visitors when that is the case. Look at New Zealand, too.
And look at the UK too, to see how a poor government can mess it up...
Re:Also, they're an island (Score:5, Informative)
The simple fact is, a "border" is a border, whether it's land, sea, or air. "Island countries" don't have any less movement across their borders; indeed, Iceland is a travel hub, and put us at a particular disadvantage in this regard; deCODE's tracing has shown that we had literally dozens of patient zeros. We're also disadvantaged by 2/3rds of the population all living in the same place instead of being spread around (in terms of density, while Reykjavík owns a ton of unoccupied land in the countryside, the density in-town is your typical "mid-sized European city" density).
Regardless, it was obvious at the time this was coming. Once we knew that Italy had been infected many weeks earlier, it was obvious that the disease had already seeded itself all over Europe. Yet we only quarantined those coming back from Italy. And some people deliberately evaded even that, by routing through other countries. So it was clear we were going to get infected. This sort of lazy early quarantine period is one of two things I'd fault the country for. The other is that we never took masks seriously. Very few people ever used them, generally just people required to do so by their employers.
The things we did do very well:
* Round up every last bit of potential testing resources we could. Private, hospital, university, everyone basically (voluntarily) commandeered into the effort. The US has under 1000x the population of Iceland but over 5000x the lab capacity. But our government made sure that everything that was possible to allocate to the fight was allocated to it, and didn't skimp on the testing budget. It was our primary weapon, and we wielded it heavily.
* We didn't just test suspected cases; we also random-sample the general population. So we knew exactly how effective our policies were being at controlling the disease at every moment in time, how best to adjust them, and also gave the first clue that this disease was actually more common / less deadly than previously assumed.
* Epidemiologists designed our policies. Politicians had nothing to do with them, they just rubber stamped them. It was epidemiologists (and the police chief) who gave our disease briefings, not politicians - again, increasing public trust and how well rules were followed.
* Rules were designed around risk factors, not what looks dramatic. We never had a lockdown. If someone is running a business with a low risk of spread, why should they be shut down? On the other hand, there was no politician handing out "essential" labels that let companies just keep operating with little to no changes. Every business had to implement anti-transmission measures - including grocery stores, pharmacies, etc. By contrast, even restaurants and movie theatres kept operating, but they had to dramatically reduce capacity, space everyone way out, clean between patrons, etc etc. Some businesses however fundamentally could not adapt - for example, hairdressers, driving instructors, swimming pools, etc, and had to be shut down.
* Rules were also applied to private gatherings, because the disease doesn't care whether you're taking risks in a workplace or with your friends. For example, unlike in New York City, where people remained free to play basketball - you know, that sport where everyone runs around breathing hard on each other and fighting to touch the same ball - we banned sports, and did enforce against anyone who was caught. Same with parties and all that sort of stuff.
* Human factors were taken into account. For example, we had two separate forms of quarantine - "quarantine" and "isolation" (the latter only for confirmed cases). It's well known that if quarantine is too harsh, people will try to avoid getting quarantined. So people in quarantine here were still allowed to go for walks (as long as they did so where they could keep dozens of meters distance from others), go for drives (but nobody could share the vehicle, they co
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The simple fact is, a "border" is a border, whether it's land, sea, or air. "Island countries" don't have any less movement across their borders; indeed, Iceland is a travel hub
True, for years Iceland has had more tourists coming through their country than the country has inhabitants.
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About six times as many in recent years. Not counting people who merely route through Iceland on transatlantic flights.
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For example, unlike in New York City, where people remained free to play basketball - you know, that sport where everyone runs around breathing hard on each other and fighting to touch the same ball - we banned sports, and did enforce against anyone who was caught.
How'd you do that without getting called racist? There would have been a huge uproar in America if we'd done that.
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One thing that a lot of people are surprised about when they hear it is that surrogacy is illegal in Iceland. It's seen as sexual exploitation.
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If you don't like mathematics, that's your problem.
Superior people have earned the pleasure of smugness. Jealous people call them assholes.
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* We didn't just test suspected cases; we also random-sample the general population.
* Epidemiologists designed our policies. Politicians had nothing to do with them,
This is where the US failed miserably. Our politicians didn't want to ruin the death rate statistics. So they only tested high risk people and those requiring medical intervention. Keep the denominator low so that the disease looks a lot more lethal than it really is.
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* Round up every last bit of potential testing resources we could. Private, hospital, university, everyone basically (voluntarily) commandeered into the effort.
Bad plan. We (the UK) decided it would be best to simply give a fuckton of money to Deloitte to sort it out. They're extremely reliable (as in they fuck things up with extreme reliability) and reliably charge a very high price for it. I know from people in the university sector that universities offered lab space, equipment, reagents and trained p
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You also have a president inciting the people in some states to break their lockdowns.
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Oh please. At no point has any UK Government decision been met with anything other than "This is the wrong thing to do" and at all other times there have been calls for "You must do this thing!"
The Government are being criticised for locking down too late. SAGE as a group wanted to defer lockdown further.
The Government are being criticised by SAGE members for reducing the lockdown. The Government are also following SAGE guidance on reducing the lockdown.
There are no easy answers. Was the Government response
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And look at the UK too, to see how a poor government can mess it up...
On one day do you complain about Brexit and how this was unfriendly to immigration, and the next do you complain about how bad we are at handling COVID.
Why do you bring Brexit in the discussion ? Let me explain why I said "poor government" : UK had 2 huge advantages over the other major European countries :
And yet they have been hitten much harder. And when you look at the number of new contaminations every day, it still doesn't seem under control.
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Yeah, this seems like the only explanation. The article makes it sound like Iceland didn't even have a contact tracing program in place until the end of February - that's really late. The UK had an established team of contact tracers who'd been busy dealing with Covid-19 cases since January, and I think the US was similar. In fact, if I remember correctly the UK was already thinking about abandoning contact tracing by this point because it just hadn't worked - most of the infections, experts reckoned, were
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The first confirmed case in Iceland was 28 February. What exactly is the point of contact tracing before then? The Italian pocket that led to the breakout in Europe (we didn't have any cases direct from China, due to restrictions) was only discovered in mid to late February, having been seeded on 31 January.
Iceland had already been following the disease closely. But you can't contact trace
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The UK had an established team of contact tracers who'd been busy dealing with Covid-19 cases since January, and I think the US was similar.
Bullshit. The U.S. had no contact tracing until March at the earliest. In fact, this late April article [go.com] talks about how states were racing to create contact tracing teams.
Further, on May 7th, this doctor told the Fox tabloid [foxnews.com] that using contact tracing as a measure of when to open states was "illogical". His quote:
"Instead of looking at the data we have, and known medical science and then using logic to guide policy, and instead of acknowledging the massive harms of total isolation, we are jumping from sort of an obsession about some sensationalized numbers or hypothetical objection, for an obsession now about testing,"
The Texas governor was even criticized in late May [houstonchronicle.com] for r
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There wasn't a huge amount of media coverage of US (or UK) contact tracing at the time because it didn't find much, but it definitely existed. For example, the first case in Seattle in mid-January was quite thoroughly contact-traced [nytimes.com] and none of the eighty-six contacts they followed up on seemed to get Covid-19 - this particular case only got the attention of the media because there was some suspicion that infections had somehow slipped through the cracks, though I think scientists have since concluded the S
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Pretty much every country in the world has long passed the point where the majority danger is from people entering the country. 'Community spread' is what needs to be stopped.
From the UK - Island nation that didn't deal with community spread and now we're paying the price being near the top of the deaths per million leaderboard.
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So according to your theory, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island should have been OK, them being islands?
Well except for one fact (Score:2)
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It's only an island if you look at it from the sea.
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Sure. But think of it as a pilot project. Now that it's been proven to work in principle, you can think about applying it on a larger scale.
If the approach did nothing in Iceland, you wouldn't even consider trying to duplicate what they did.
Not this again (Score:2)
As a proportion of the country's population, this was far faster than the rate at which cases in the United States were growing.
This is juggling numbers for two reasons:
1. You have a disease that spreads over time, from patients zero. The number of infected at a certain time depend on the initial number, the time past, and the (exponential) rate of growth. If you make this proportional by dividing by the total population, then of course you get a much lower number for the much larger population of the US.
2. In the beginning, the US was barely testing. If you don't detect a lot of infections, then your numbers go up less rapidly. Onc
Re: Not this again (Score:2)
We are 11th. Considering we should have the world's best healthcare system we should be at the bottom or middle of the list. Being this high shows how much of problem it actually is. And of the top 10, only 4 are comparable to the US and all are further along on the pandemic lifecycle.
UK & Spain messed up as bad as us. Sweden didn't really do containment measures. Italy was the canary. No idea why France did so bad. But also keep in mind that all but UK have large elderly populations.
The question is
And the problem? (Score:2)
"One young woman was so active before she tested positive — going to classes, rehearsing a play, attending choir practice — that her contacts numbered close to two hundred."
So, assisting Darwin with efficient culling of the hominids?
Re: (Score:2)
Amusing Slashdot fortune today, by the way.
"How many Bavarian Illuminati does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three: one to screw it in, and one to confuse the issue."
Adam Weishaupt approves.
Herding cats (Score:3)
364,000 people isn't that much. To get a picture, have a look through the images at: https://lime.link/blog/visuali... [lime.link]
Take the last picture and triple it. It gives an idea of how many people live in Iceland. To do the same for the US (330M pop.) does one need scale this up almost a thousand times and for India and China (~1.4B pop. each) it's even bigger.
Factor in that Iceland basically has one, single international airport. Their tracking team of 52 had a nice and easy starting point.
Just for fun, try to figure out how many international airports there are in the US, India or China.
Re:Herding cats (Score:4, Insightful)
And given that the US has 5000 times as many labs as Iceland, scaling this response in the US would be trivial. And a tracking team of 52 thousand people would be a trivial thing for the US to get together, and by far enough to handle the 330 ports of entry to the US.
Iceland has MUCH less available resources per capita than the US has, yet they pulled this off. The reason the US can't is political, not scale.
And you know, I find it amusing that every time something is done well somewhere, someone has to try to explain how economy of scale does not work in the US. Must be something rather broken since that is always the case.
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I wonder if America has enough people to supply 52 tracking people to each international airport...
You need the number of airports as well as the number of inland destinations for further flights.
Again, Iceland wins, because next to having one international airport do they also have only one more national airport that's of any significance (there are also a few more smaller ones, but almost every city in the world no matter its size has got a landing strip somewhere).
Taiwan, Australia, China, Norway (Score:2)
They all have eliminated Covid-19 quickly and effectively.
China, outside Wuhan, only had a tiny fraction of the cases per population that the USA did, even if you quadruple the official Chinese figures and do not do the same for the USA figures.
here's how you control the infection (Score:1)
1. be an island
EZ
another case in point: Cyprus. yeah geez
Re: (Score:2)
Finland isn't an island. China isn't an island. Switzerland isn't an island. Denmark isn't an island. They've all had tremendous success.
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Rankings of countries by CoVID-19 deaths per capita [statista.com]. Switzerland (just behind the US, ahead of Canada) and Denmark are in the top 25; Finland is number 27. And if you believe China's numbers, well you're a fool.
Looking at the list, the Balkans basically kicked the rear-end of the rest of Europe, and the lockdowns started later - without contact tracing (I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, right up until March 13th, and it was still wide-open there).
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Czech Republic kicked ass too - they immediately jumped on #masks4all and didn't shut down their economy. 12x lower death rate than Sweden.
Did Bulgaria do the same when you were there?
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Switzerland has had more infections per capita than Italy. I wouldn't call that a success.
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Are you confusing Trump with China?
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It Sounds Like a Hercule Effort Even for... (Score:2)
It sounds like a Herculean effort even for the most sparsely populated country on the planet.
I guess the problem stems from the infection bias. If the virus infected normal people, they would infect very few other people. But the virus invariably infects people who will be in contact with hundreds of other people.
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"It sounds like a Herculean effort even for the most sparsely populated country on the planet."
They aren't sparsely populated, like anyone else they are mostly concentrated in a few areas. What matters is how densely you're packed, and what percentage of your population you dedicate to response, and of course what your response actually is.
The more population you have, the more people you have to employ in response, but the percentage of population you have to assign only varies with density.
If they had a p
Re: (Score:2)
So How Did the 15 Minute Rule Work Out For Them? (Score:2)
So how well did this 15 minute rule work for them? Considering that they were right on the ball with the start of the pandemic, the group was formed before the first case, and it still ravaged the country at a rate greater than basically everywhere else for a while. I do not think we can realistically give credit to this organization. The virus went from 0 to out of control under their watch, and they claim to have not changed their methods of learned anything major during this phase. And then it magically
Re: (Score:2)
I think the populous just learned to stop invecting each other.
The world could use less inventiveness.
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They were not aware of the extent of the spread, just like so many other countries. Like even the summary says, they had several strains of the virus. The group was thus formed before spotting the first case, not before the first case actually existed. Also Iceland did take other measures into action as well. Just that the contact tracing team didn't change anything. Iceland did a massive amount of testing and they did have closures of some schools and restaurants as well as restrictions on gatherings and g
Wow (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sparsely populated? Not so much... (Score:2)
Looking at the demographics of Iceland, [worldpopul...review.com], we find that:
The Capital Region accounts for 64% of Iceland's total population.
When nearly 2/3rds of the entire population lives in a single metropolitan area, and the rest are congregated in urban areas , it's really not sparsely populated. It's a massive population center, and several smaller ones, and a lot of empty nothing in-between. More like islands of people, rather than a few spread out everywhere.
Peoples' sense of risk is way off (Score:2)
Do not need to be an island to stop spread (Score:2)
These are basic epidemiology 101 tools. You have to be able to test massive numbers of people and have huge data collection for contact tracing purposes. One of the best data sources is cell phones. Its not a violation of privacy since the cell phone data can be used exclusively for this purpose and destroyed when no longer useable. The US needs to have enormous testing capacity on standby to test 10% of the population per day for any virus or bacteria using automated testing platforms using micro-controlle
If we're going to laud "good" virus responses (Score:2)
Re:Wait, what, different STRAINS??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Viruses mutate constantly. Every generation of a virus like this usually has a couple mutations from their "parent". Not so much a deliberate thing as the fact that they lack error checking in their replication, because the shorter their RNA code, the more copies of themselves they can make from a given resource.
People often think of mutation in viruses as being fast in order to evade immune systems, and yes it does help with this, but it's actually extremely hazardous for viruses as well. The overwhelming majority of copies produced are less fit than their parent, if they even have any infectious ability at all. It's been shown with some viral diseases that if you artificially boost the mutation rate even slightly, the disease dies off; they live on the bleeding edge of the level of errors that they can tolerate.
Any single random mutation is highly, highly, highly unlikely to just allow a virus to totally evade the immune system. As a general rule, it takes seasonal viruses a whole year of evolution in the tropics / opposite hemisphere to change enough to bypass the immune system. And even then, it's not so much going from "the person has 100% immunity to the person having 0% immunity". It's more that the level of immunity that every person has drops somewhat, and the longer it's been since a person was infected by that or a similar strain, the less immune they'll get. You have a population of people with different levels of immunity, granting some net level of herd immunity that declines over time. Eventually the level of herd immunity becomes low enough to allow for Rt > 1, the dam bursts, and the disease spreads through the population, until Rt 1 is restored and the disease locally dies back off.
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FYI: China had the most severe lockdown. And now China is testing ALL 10.000.000 inhabitants of Wuhan. Nowhere else in the world is this virus taken more seriously.
Meanwhile Brasil has stopped counting cases as well as victims.