Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter
How Iceland ‘Virtually Eliminated’ Its Coronavirus Cases (newyorker.com) 120
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:3, Insightful)
by I’mjusthere ( 6916492 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @06:54AM (#60155498)It is amazing how beneficial competent leadership is!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.
Re: Great Leadership (Score:2, Informative)
That’s a moronic comment because you will obviously have proportionally more people available to track and trace as wellIceland 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
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
- 50 cent Pooh bear mods down truth.
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
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
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
Hawaii is another example.
Oahu has a few cases, but all the other islands are now covid-free.
Iceland has 364,134 people in it. My city barely has that many.
Yep, social distancing is the norm in Iceland.
- My suburb near San Francisco has more people, much higher density, less control over travelers in and out, no real contact tracing and fewer cases and deaths by any metric than Iceland.
We must have AMAZING leadership in my town. The world should come here to find out how to get lucky.
- LIkewise, down here in Ventura/Camarillo/Oxnard/Port Hueneme (the plain at the mouth of the Santa Clara river), we’ve got about the same population AND population density (when compared to the Reykavik area) as Iceland – and 11 total deaths. And we share a long border with LA County. Our leadership does very little, actually. And it tends to work better that way.
- by Rei ( 128717 )
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 cbecoming 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.
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
* 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)
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…..
- by Rei ( 128717 )
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.
- by shanen ( 462549 )
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.”
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!- by Rei ( 128717 )
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 me
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.
Re:Great Leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
by s_p_oneil ( 795792 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @08:27AM (#60155636) HomepageI’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.
- Hong Kong also succeeded in getting the virus under control and Singapore seems to be getting things back in order after completely messing up protecting their migrant workers. Does Hong Kong have a high enough population for you to reconsider?
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?
- There is evidence that temperature [cebm.net] affects transmission; warmer areas (of which would be HK and SG, especially compared to most of NY City these last few months) have lower incidence of infection. In fact, if it is similar to SARS (a close relative of CoVID-19), we may find that [cebm.net]:
the optimum environmental temperature associated with the SARS cases was between 16 to 28 degrees Celsius
That would explain why places like most of Africa – and in fact the Southern Hemisphere in general – and SE Asia had relatively few infections. And places like Iceland, Greenland, Japan, the Scandinavian nations, etc. all were rel
Re:Great Leadership (Score:5, Informative)
by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @09:31AM (#60155768) HomepageThis 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”?
- by Rei ( 128717 )
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
“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
NYC forced nursing homes to take Covid-19 patients. [msn.com]
I suspect those high-density areas you mentioned did no such thing.
Competent leadership indeed.
- San Francisco is also one of the highest density cities in America, and it has an infection rate that’s a tiny fraction of NYCs, so density doesn’t really explain it either.
- So’s a winning lottery ticket, but those tend to be far more common.
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.
- by PPH ( 736903 )
Do you want to mess with Thor? Because I don’t.
We got stuck with Loki.
It is amazing how beneficial competent leadership is!
It really is, as the U.S. shows as well – Iceland has just 29 deaths per million people [worldometers.info] from Covid, while in the U.S. you have four states that have managed to surpass or equal that [worldometers.info] (Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming) and several states close behind, despite all of them being more crowded generally than Iceland.
Iceland is lucky they had no NYC equivalent for the country, no cities with crowded subways, a population which mostly has their own cars for trave
- Just a little easier to secure your borders and test ALL visitors when that is the case. Look at New Zealand, too.
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)
by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @08:35AM (#60155648) HomepageThe 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
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.
- by Rei ( 128717 )
About six times as many in recent years. Not counting people who merely route through Iceland on transatlantic flights.
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.
- Iceland is weird. It’s incredibly liberal in several regards, but the country also won’t let you call your baby just anything you want [ted.com]. Having over an order of magnitude fewer people also makes it easier to police.
- by PPH ( 736903 )
* 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.
* 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
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.
We’re one of the densest populated countries in Europe all while we are an island, and with London at the heart of it. Of course this has consequences!! You only ignore them.
Why do you think the virus started in China? China has more than 1.4B people. They now even have laws on how many children a family is allowed to have (it’s 2 children btw). They’re well
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 :
- – Being an island (or many if you want)
- – Having been hit 2-3 weeks later by the pandemic
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.
… it still doesn’t seem under control.
Right there, that’s your ignorance. You don’t even know what “it” is. You just blame them for not having “it” under control. You just keep looking at the numbers like someone who is staring at the clock waiting for the lunch break.
The word you’re looking for is “people”. What you want is for the government to put harder control on us… We don’t let them! That’s not on our government, that’s who we are. We do have social distancing rules, many shops are closed, and those that are open have security and the
- by makomk ( 752139 )
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
- by Rei ( 128717 )
The article makes it sound like Iceland didn’t even have a contact tracing program in place until the end of February
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
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
- by makomk ( 752139 )
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
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.
- by nospam007 ( 722110 ) *
So according to your theory, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island should have been OK, them being islands?
- Not if you’re living in a retirement home where “leadership” knowingly sent sick people by policy.
- by DRJlaw ( 946416 )
Not if you’re living in a retirement home where “leadership” knowingly sent sick people by policy.
I haven’t seen any evidence of that.
And, following your lead, I’m not going to read any links that may you post in an attempt to back it up.
- They’ve got bridges so they’re not functionally islands anymore. Not saying that’s the Iceland explanation though.
It’s only an island if you look at it from the sea.
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.
- by Anonymous Coward
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
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
Re:Wait, what, different STRAINS??? (Score:5, Insightful)
by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @08:47AM (#60155670) HomepageViruses 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.
“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?
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.
- by Joe2020 ( 6760092 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @08:09AM (#60155602)
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.
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).
- Sure and how many ports for both people and goods with almost all of them coming from China and infected Europe and how many crossing by land from uncontrollable southern border? I suspect the number of unknown and illegal border jumpers in Iceland hovers around zero every year.
1. be an island
EZ
another case in point: Cyprus. yeah geez
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.
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).
Switzerland has had more infections per capita than Italy. I wouldn’t call that a success.
- Whataboutism from 50 cent Pooh bear poster.
- by Zocalo ( 252965 )Like Great Britain? The island of Ireland & Northern Ireland? The Isle of Man? The Channel Islands? All arguably first world administrative regions with no land borders that didn’t exceed their available medical capacity for ventilators, yet all well inside the top 20 deaths per capita list on Worldometers’s Covid-19 tracker. [worldometers.info] Being an island might be something you can work with, but without effective and enforced policy to actually control the spread it’s neither here nor there should the virus get
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.
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.
“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
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
- by PPH ( 736903 )
I think the populous just learned to stop invecting each other.
The world could use less inventiveness.
- So the most sparsely populated country has the easiest time of getting rid of a virus transmitted by contact AND they’re trying to spin it as “it’s because they spied on everyone?” Who comes up with this idiocy?
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.
- At the end of the day, Covid-19 in the US killed 2000 per day for a few days at its *peak*. 2000 people die in the US every single day *on average* due to heart disease. 8000 people die every day in the US on average due to all causes. Here in Ohio, the vast majority of deaths were in long term care facilities and two prisons. I once took a look at the top 10 preventable causes of deaths in the US, and about 8 of them were strongly influenced by diet and exercise. Go ahead and contact trace if you want
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 governments for keeping their virus numbers low, why not an article on Orange County, California [latimes.com]? We’re at just 55 deaths per million, only slightly higher than Iceland’s 29 and half Germany’s 105. Cases are at 2305 per million, vs Iceland’s 5298. This despite having 10x the population (3.175 million) of Iceland, and roughly the same population density as its urban areas (1541 persons/km^2 vs 1100 for the Reykjavik area). And unlike Iceland which has the good fortune of being an is
- They really only have one entry/exit port to the outside world in their only major city. Most of their population lives in this city. Their population isn’t a melting pot of entitlement; they were all willing to get tested and follow social guidelines.
- True, we haven’t had a good war started in several years. The shows on the military channel are all recycled. We need a new war so they can show off all the new toys since the last one.
Oh, war monger Trump is reducing troop levels in Germany. How the fuck are we supposed to kill people and play global cop if we reduce troop levels at key forward bases?
There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.
Related Links Top of the: day, week, month.
- 548 comments‘No Clear Evidence’ Hydroxychloroquine Works Against COVID-19
- 533 commentsTrump Declares National Emergency To Speed Coronavirus Response
- 526 commentsCoronavirus: Trump Suspends Travel From Europe To US
- 472 commentsAlone In A Crowded Milky Way
- 467 commentsWHO Lauds Lockdown-Ignoring Sweden As a ‘Model’ For Countries Going Forward
Slashdot Top Deals
- Get more comments
- 100 of 118 loaded
“Out of register space (ugh)” — vi
