UK Reports Highest Coronavirus Death Toll In Europe (axios.com) 227
The U.K. surpassed Italy on Tuesday to report the most coronavirus deaths in Europe, according to Johns Hopkins data and its own tracker. Axios reports: The country, which prolonged its lockdown last month until at least the second week of May, has reported more than 196,000 cases compared to Italy's roughly 213,000. Imperial College London is undertaking the randomized testing of 100,000 people in England this week to gain data on when the lockdown might be able to lift, per The Guardian. "Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Tuesday that 29,427 people have died with Covid-19 since the outbreak began, more than in Italy and lower only than the United States," adds CNN. "The official figure includes 693 new deaths in the most recent 24-hour period, up to 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) Monday."
Per capita??? (Score:4, Insightful)
UK deaths per million is 433, Italy is 485 per million so while they are comparable, the UK is not yet ahead. The number of deaths alone doesn't tell you anything when you are comparing countries (and even then with differences in how Covid deaths are counting, you may not be comparing like to like).
Re:Per capita??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolute number are fairly pointless... They do tend to allow for specific agendas though.
Re:Per capita??? (Score:4, Interesting)
> They do tend to allow for specific agendas though.
Yes, like knowing when to get into the coffin supply market.
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The point is they are NEEDLESS deaths. But hey, if you're offering go find a large bridge or something.
Needlessly makes it sound like we could easily save these people but couldn't be arsed. They're AVOIDABLE deaths through a massive society-wide effort which is not really the same.
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Well if we are counting it similarly to Belgium then we are the worst in Europe per capita by quite a margin. 53,800 up to 5th of May, some estimating but likely very accurate.
Our government screwed up badly.
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That's because UK is way up there on population density (Which is a strong negative factor in spread), and a large degree of that is in concentrated urban environment. This means that anything that hits is going to run like wildfire, compared to the more evenly spread and sparser populations.
So far, I'm not aware of the healthcare boundaries being overwhelmed (which is the main factor in fatalities increasing beyond deaths that would have occurred once infection sets in, and do bear in mind, we're just at
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I'm not sure that the current UK government deserves much criticism for its immediate response in recent weeks. As the comments above have said, they were working quickly with partial information and they do seem to have been largely following the expert advice. I don't know what else we could reasonably have expected of them in that situation.
Where I suspect there will be more criticism is in the long-term under-investment in the NHS and social care provision, which is a political decision that resulted in
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Where I suspect there will be more criticism is in the long-term under-investment in the NHS and social care provision, which is a political decision that resulted in shortages everywhere from front-line clinical staff to routine PPE.
Also Brexit. The NHS runs on immigrant labour and has since it's inception. Well, we have less of that now too.
but there is a striking gap in outcomes between the UK and Germany, which seems to be at least partly due to the better preparedness of the German healthcare system.
An
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That's because UK is way up there on population density (Which is a strong negative factor in spread), and a large degree of that is in concentrated urban environment. This means that anything that hits is going to run like wildfire, compared to the more evenly spread and sparser populations.
South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore are all just as densely populated, if not more so.
While I think UK had been doing their best since they locked down. The complete inaction in the first two weeks of March, while everybody watched the number of cases grew from 36 to over 1000, deserved every criticism they get. Yes, herd immunity, I meant you.
UK could have tried to procure more PPE and more test kits from the world during those two weeks. They could have implemented the lockdown any time during th
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So does the US. Doesn't matter how or why you actually died. If they test positive or showed symptoms, it's a Covid death
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Yah. What I want to know is what Portugal did to come out with such a low deathrate from cv-19... Lower than Canada, even....
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If you're going to get into a dicksize competition then at least use San Marino or Vatican City, which are the worst-hit countries in the world in terms of cases per million.
Crazy that people are arguing over whose way of tallying quarter of a million dead is the most cromulent...
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Yeah, except almost 30000 deaths is a large number by virtually any measure, especially since they're likely under-counting, like everyone else.
This isn't a few people, it's 30 thousand people. I get that when numbers start to get beyond a few dozen, we group them together and sort of only see them as a number, but that's a tragedy by nearly any reckoning. Even on a per-capita basis, they certainly aren't doing as well as a lot of other countries. Don't be so friggin' cavalier.
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The estimated actual number is 53,800.
42,000 to mid March, the rest estimated to 5th of May.
That's the number of excess deaths above what would be expected in a normal year, similar weather etc.
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A better measurement would be excess deaths over normal, in combination with some idea of excess deaths not caused by covid.
...and also factoring in deaths from other causes avoided due to stay-at-home orders. For example, automobile accident deaths are down (though not as much as they should be because apparently when the roads are more empty more assholes speed so what accidents we do have are more lethal.) Gun deaths actually are not down, which must be an increase in suicide/domestic violence making up for the decrease in mass shootings which are kinda hard to accomplish when there are so few masses to shoot at. The influ
Re:Per capita??? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a simple, reliable way to measure deaths from COVID 19. Just compare the number of deaths registered against the expected amount for this time of year.
The difference are all due to COVID, either directly or indirectly.
It's not perfect but will get you within a few percent of the true figure. It's comparable between countries too because it eliminates issues with different ways of counting.
Re:Per capita??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolute number are fairly pointless... They do tend to allow for specific agendas though.
The interesting thing is that, in a pandemic, during the exponential growth phase, actually the absolute numbers are a direct measure of the effectiveness of the response. Firstly, if we are doubling every two days, the earliest point(s) of infection are much more important than the later ones - e.g. if there's a single infection and then another infection after a week and a half, the second infection has kills 1/48 of the number of people that the first kills.
Secondly, assuming similar population density etc. the size of the population has no effect on the rate of spread. A bigger population just takes longer to infect.
This means that absolute numbers actually are a good measure.
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Assuming population density and urbanisation, yes. However, they're a very mixed feast throughout Europe. The UK is right towards the top in population density and urban population (meaning it's mostly full of people living in dense city). Belgium is around the UK level, and has the respectively higher spread.
Re: Per capita??? (Score:2)
Lots n lots of factors going into how fast it will spread, general population density is just one.
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Absolutely right. But this is The Guardian, who don't like the current Government, so will do everything they can to make things look worse.
Two of the confounding factors when looking at the numbers are population density, and percentage living in urban environment, where Belgium is way up there (which is one reason they're hit hard), and the UK is close to the top of that table too.
But, as with all epidemiology, what everyone forgets is this is taken as a sample at this point in time. Right the way throu
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We're talking about a country lead by a man who bragged about shaking hands, in some sort of bizarre moronic version of Mao swimming the Yangtze, while at the same time apparently not even bothering to show up at COBRA meetings. The leadership at the top was utterly broken. It's not clear that it's any better, considering the dust up over being part of the EU's PPE scheme. Even now, the man acts as if the only thing in the world that matters is Brexit.
Re:Per capita??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no big Johnson fan, but this is just silly.
There is no reason to expect the PM to chair early meetings on every subject. That's part of what Cabinet is there for.
The EU scheme is controversial. Maybe it would have been better to join. Still, at the time that criticism was all kicking off, the scheme hadn't delivered anything more than promises.
As for only caring about Brexit, the man apparently almost died from the virus a few days ago, and he's also seen his pregnant fiancee and several of his closest work colleagues hit hard by it. That's going to focus anyone's mind on health.
Re:Per capita??? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm no big Johnson fan
What's not to like about big johnsons?
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No, going to COBRA meetings about a major pandemic is his job. The reason they had so many of them is because they knew it was serious.
Maybe if he had been doing something important he could have argued he didn't need to be there. But he was just on holiday, a holiday which we are not entirely sure who paid for.
I doubt any experience will focus Boris' mind on health because that's not a legacy he can build. The COVID-19 response is already screwed up beyond fixing and his focus now is probably on finding so
Re:Per capita??? (Score:5, Interesting)
It’s a common thread, all the western countries lead by right wing nationalist populists are suffering the worst death rates. The UK, US, Italy and Brazil are examples.
They get the governments they deserve.
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No need to ad hom the Guardian. These are government figures and certainly too low due to lag in reporting some deaths.
It's a very reliable method too. Compare the number of expected deaths to the number actually registered.
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Wasn't using ad-hominem on the Guardian. They have a biased agenda, and that's public record,. They have some good stories, and some absolutely atrocious ones. That one kinda hits the "Definitely not objective". And where the Tories are concerned, The Guardian is rarely objective. Again, that's record on its assessment by independent entities who evaluate a general left/right skew.
In this case, I was assessing they were very biased, and mentioning that I wasn't surprised, because they were The Guardian
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Absolute number are fairly pointless...
It depends what you're measuring and why. If it's being compared to "no. of hospital beds available" or "no. of ICUs" then it's the deaths-per-million figure that's pointless.
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Where did you get those stats from by the way? It's the kind of level when you need to be citing your data sources.
It is of interest.
Re: Per capita??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Death per million is still worse in Italy, Spain and Belgium (and Andorra as well as San Marino, but with a total population where every death counts for a few dozen per million, let's ignore them). The thing is that all of them (with the possible exception of Belgium where I really have no idea what's going on there) have been way longer into the infection cycle and we know by now that the death toll only grows, so yes, the UK likely will pass them eventually.
Probably within a week or two, actually.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Belgium Re: Per capita??? (Score:4, Informative)
> (with the possible exception of Belgium where I really have no idea what's going on there)
Belgium is at the top with a death rate of 605 deaths/million because authorities include confirmed Covid deaths and also those suspected of being linked, whether the victim was tested or not.
See story https://www.npr.org/sections/c... [npr.org].
Re: Per capita??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Death per million is still worse in Italy, Spain and Belgium
Yeah, three countries which got hit hard at a time when nothing was known about the virus during a major festival season. The UK is trying to catch them with all the benefit of foresight and stupidity.
Re: Per capita??? (Score:3)
Re:Per capita??? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing is for certain, the UK, and in particular its leadership, took a pretty darned cavalier attitude. The Prime Minister was bragging about being so confident that he was shaking hands often, only to end up in ICU. Hubris is the best word I can think for it.
Re: Per capita??? (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, people from the UK just made him believe that, and were quite disappointed when he survived.
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And the Liberate mob can point to Boris as proof of their point.
Of course, any industrialized world leader will get the best care money can buy. I'm waiting to see what happens if/when Xi/Netanyahu/Duterte come down with Covid. I'd predict higher than average survival rates for that sample group.
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Yes, the Bilderberg sample group will do fairly well.
I'd probably be a member if I'd bought a ton of stock in Plexiglas fabrication.
Re: Per capita??? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The fact that he couldn't be bothered at attend the COBRA meetings is the most damning part. If course he was shaking hands, be skipped the meetings that would have informed him how catastrophical stupid that was.
Re:Per capita??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Johnson likes the idea of being PM. He gets limo rides, he gets a bully pulpit to show how smart he is, and he gets to hang out at Number 10 and pretend he's just like Disraeli, Gladstone and Churchill. But at actually governing, that's not his strong suit. Actually, I'm not sure what Boris Johnson's strong suit is, other than being a clown. But considering the detritus that now makes up the British cabinet, he probably is first among equals. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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Hush! A few more tries and we're maybe rid of that particular bad hair legislation period.
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It's why there's a cabinet. Not all of those meetings warrant an attendance. When things started looking serious, he was there.
That's how Government functions. Left, right, middle.
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The fact that he couldn't be bothered at attend the COBRA meetings is the most damning part. If course he was shaking hands, be skipped the meetings that would have informed him how catastrophical stupid that was.
If he was stupid enough to go get himself infected. Not spreading it to the rest of COBRA was probably the best 'decision' he has made so far.
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"Poetic justice" is what came to my mind.
Cavalier Indeed (Score:3)
Cavalier is definitely the right word, the first reported case in the UK was on the 31st of January, when the current government was obsessed with celebrating brexit [youtube.com] all the while ignoring reports from all over the world [wikipedia.org] that things were getting serious.
Boris Johnson then took a two week holiday [theguardian.com] while COVID-19 was spiraling out of control [wikipedia.org]. When the EU instigated emergency planning to group purchase PPE and ventilators, meetings were ignored because of the governments brexit euphoria.
Absolutely nothing was d
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Re:Per capita??? (Score:5, Informative)
While that's a valid technical point, at the rate they are going UK will be above Italy in deaths/million in fairly short order. They reported 693 deaths in the last 24 hour period where Italy only had 236, and UKs population is only 10% larger than Itay's.
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Much more densely populated and urbanised though.
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Germans are notorious to do as they're told. They were told "stay the fuck at home!" and so they did, because that's what you do when you're told to do so.
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Two points:
It is not reasonable to make well-mixedness assumptions about the infected population when it comes to evaluating the response of interventions while the case count is a low proportion of the population.
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Actually, the UK is "ahead" per capita if you take into account the population distribution. ~80% of COVID deaths are for people above 65, which represent 23% of the population of Italy vs 18% of the population of the UK.
So, for this at-risk population, the death rate in Italy is ~1700 per million, and ~1900 per million in the UK.
Nonsensical summary (Score:2)
more than 196,000 cases compared to Italy's roughly 213,000
In what way is 196k > 213k?
I figured this was just a slashdot problem, but the original Axios summary matches the quote. What gives here?
Re: Nonsensical summary (Score:2)
Maybe it's more per capita . . .
Let's see:
UK: ~68M
Italy: ~60M
No further questions.
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It's opposite day.
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They are talking about deaths, not cases. UK having a higher death to case ratio is another problem, as is their trend for case numbers, which is yet to start leveling off (so they'll be past Italy and Spain in raw case count by the end of the week).
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That means that Britain is at about 92% of the cases in Italy, and Italy appears to be flattening the curve, while Britain is still climbing it. I don't think there's much doubt in the next few weeks Britain will not only top Italy in the number of absolute cases, but in cases per capita. Britain is adding about 4 times the number of cases as Italy, and three times the number of fatalities.
Let's use another metric. Britain's 2018 GDP was 2.89 trillion dollars, as compared to Italy at 2.08 trillion. Britain
UK Covid scientist Neil Ferguson's been a bad boy (Score:5, Informative)
Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover: Prof Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk]
“Ms Staats,made a second visit on April 8 despite telling friends she suspected that her husband, an academic in his 30s, had symptoms of coronavirus.”
Rules for thee but not for me.
The mind boggles (Score:2)
The party of family values, I wonder has many conservatives imagined this sort of set up, though I can see why he was tempted.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/05... [metro.co.uk]
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I don't know what test you use, but the test commonly used is to specifically look for the SARS2-CoV RNA. It's not an extremely accurate test, but it will not be confused by H1N1 or Bird Flu.
Re:UK Covid scientist Neil Ferguson's been a bad b (Score:5, Informative)
Surgeons wear masks mostly to protect the patient, but it does have to do with stopping viruses and bacteria, even though surgical masks are not as high efficiency as the N95 masks we've been hearing about.
N95 masks are certified to stop 95% of particles 0.3 microns in size. A couple of things about that:
Unsurprisingly, the N95 masks do better against larger particles. Perhaps surprisingly, they also do better against smaller particles, too.
The largest particles are to big to get through the spaces in the mask. Smaller particles that are still relatively big can make it through the spaces, but most of them have too much momentum to follow the air flow around the obstacles, and impinge on the fibers and stick. Particles smaller than 0.3 tend to diffuse into the fibers and stick. 0.3 microns is near the least efficient point of filtration.
Viruses and bacteria are not commonly found floating alone in the air by themselves, anyway. They are almost always attached to much larger dust or droplets, those fluids that you talked about the masks being designed to stop.
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But (Score:4, Funny)
The UK is no longer in Europe.
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Put it in perspective (Score:2)
The 29,427 number is 13% higher so far than a bad flu season.
This may be unpopular, but the stats keep suggesting that this is bad, but not as bad as we thought it would be. The extreme lockdowns seem like an overreaction.
The Swedish model seems more appropriate.
Look at total mortality (Score:2)
The trick is to look at the total deaths in a country. This eliminates any variation or bias in reporting COVID-related deaths. For the UK, the total deaths appear to be here. [ons.gov.uk] For the US, the total deaths are here. [cdc.gov] Similar charts are available for many countries.
Looking at total deaths shows that COVID really is pretty serious. Some charts are available showing previous, serious flu outbreaks - the COVID spike is higher, and the effectiveness of the lockdowns and social distancing is also apparent.
Of course
Re:Usless number. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh shut up.
It's not manipulation, different countries report in different ways and have different capacity for doing so. This has been a problem from the start; at first it looked like the UK had plateau'd and started down trending in deaths every weekend, but then it jumped again every Tuesday. Turns out NHS hospitals are shit at collating stats on weekends and it took until Tuesday every week to log all the weekend deaths. Similarly it wasn't even tracking care home deaths at first, it took about 6 weeks before they were included then the figure jumped by 4,000 deaths as a result.
Other countries have similar problems: it's far easier to collate deaths daily from 800 hospitals that have a unified reporting structure than it is from 20,000 care homes that are all privately run and do things their own way for example. Because of this it's not uncommon for stats to not flow in consistently and for there to be sudden jumps as they're updated.
You're literally just spreading conspiracy theory shit when there's absolutely zero justification to do so. Stop being a foot soldier of the far right using this crisis to push your fake news agenda to further your cause. We're all tired of it now.
Re:Usless number. (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole thing has been an interesting lesson in proper presentation of data.
The networks run a U.S. map colored in for the number of cases per state. That's basically nothing but a population map. It's useless.
The data coming in from various countries is reported on different intervals, according to different standards, and with different amounts of back-dating. So Belgium which reports presumed-case morbidity has been at the top of the per-capita death charts undeservedly. But it gets more subtle.
If you look at the worldometer chart and the wikipedia chart for, say, Sweden, they look totally different. Worldometer just graphs what was reported on a particular day, Wikipedia goes into the data which apparently includes back-dates to the day of death, and corrects the previous days. You'd think the latter is more the more accurate way to do it, but since this data is backdating so many days the result is it always looks like Sweden is on a sharp decline in deaths, when its decline is rather shallow if any, because the data for the last several data points (not just the latest few) is incomplete and will be revised upward over the course of a week. I saw one chart (from MA DoH I think) that actually bar-stacked the deaths color coded by how many days late they appeared in the reporting which was a good way to prevent this misinterpretation.
Another useless chart we see are the ones where, among resolved cases, the percent of deaths is graphed. Since deaths happen weeks before recoveries are reported (and states don't make any effort to report people recovered in a timely manner), some of these charts would have a naive reader thinking COVID-19 killed like 40% of the peope who caught it.
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It looks like we have lost nearly 6% of our care home population in the last month. Normally it would be 2.5%.
And that's not including staff.
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Quite probably. It's a sad, sad time. :(
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Turns out NHS hospitals are shit at collating stats on weekends and it took until Tuesday every week to log all the weekend deaths.
The US does the same thing, though maybe they are doing better under COVID. I've had a relative with a questionable death certificate, because they were busy. A doctor must declare death. If the doctors are busy,
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Note that the official "day" starts/ends at 0:00 UTC. Notes include jumps causes by reporting irregularities like
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Maybe a country whose leader didn't mock COVID-19 until he actually got sick by it? Just a thought.
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Not all that random. He was bragging about how he was going to keep on shaking hands. I guess he missed the part where when Churchill said "we will fight on the beaches", that Churchill didn't literally mean *he'd* be fighting on the beaches.
Boris is another Etonian halfwit who thinks memorizing a thesaurus, learning a bit of Latin and memorizing Kipling makes him immortal.
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... and smart.
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Yes, he survived it, but later reports said he was pretty close to being put on a ventilator, and that's the point where dying becomes a stronger likelihood.
Re:But I thought universal healthcare was so much (Score:5, Insightful)
Random process - anyone can get "sick by it".
For example, the leader of Taiwan just treated it as a complete joke, which is why everyone in Taiwan is dead .. oh. Well, wait a second, the leader of South Korea, he surely .. oh. Well that woman in New Zealand. She clearly would have "mocked" covid-19 and the population of NZ must be reeling from the shock of death .. oh almost no deaths? what? How wierd, you'd almost think it was a disease that could be controlled with public health measures rather than a game of Russian roulette.
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I never mocked it, and I know of a lot of other people that didn't. Even many of those who thought it wasn't going to be a that big of a problem didn't mock it, unless they were assholes.
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Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, Bill DeBlasio are just a small subset of left-wing people who mocked it in the US alone, _after_ Trump started to take it seriously.
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Re:But I thought universal healthcare was so much (Score:5, Informative)
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You American? Canada says hi. 1/10th the population of the US but 1/20th the COVID numbers. Wonder what the difference is. Could be the universal health care, could be the people staying home enabled by the CERB payments that go to the people, not the corporations. Hard to say...
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1/10th the population of the US but 1/20th the COVID numbers.
All spread over roughly the same land mass (Canada 9,9 Milion square miles, US 9.5 Millin square miles) - perhaps 1/10th the population density?
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The mean population density is basically a pointless measure. Canada has some very large, very sparse regions (most of it). A better measure which no one really seems to track is the median per-person population density. For example, for each person wok out what the local population density is surrounding them, then find the median of that.
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Shows America as quite a bit worse. 72,241 deaths, 218 per million, 964,743 active cases vs Canada, 4,043 deaths, 107 per million, 31,010 active cases.
We're likely counting all cases unlike places like Florida which only counts cases in hospitals and refuses to count other deaths. My mistake, they started reporting last Saturday. Still with how politicized America is, their numbers are hard to trust.
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Good points, we probably have close to the same flights from China here in Vancouver, one of the more densely populated city's in the world (5th, behind San Fransisco and New York) with a large (27%) percentage of Chinese, though most of Canada's cases came from America, Iran and Italy.
You are correct that America got its first case before Canada, by one day.
It is true we're not motivated to deny how many deaths there are, 4 today along with 8 new cases here in BC.
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It is, but our government has spent a decade sabotaging it.
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As did the previous. I've worked for the NHS for a long time now, so I've seen it happen, and the most hated government covering the was the prior one (because they postured and used the NHS for news soundbites all the while stripping budgets). .The falsehoods ran rife, as did the cuts.
The one that people were most nervous of is the current one (a fear of it being sold). Whether or not that's founded or not, I honestly don't know, so I do share some of that worry.
We do know you have a very strong left wi
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We do know you have a very strong left wing bias, but please do be objective.
Eh what? He seems left of centre to me but not particularly far. Not exacting a Corbynista that's for sure.
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So is the rest of the world. Your point?