We need a travel ban to Sweden for the foreseeable time.
It seems they are taking a different approach than it seems everywhere else. Keeping the country fully open including nightclubs etc. no limits on gatherings etc.
They have a decent amount of cases too and it’s so contagious I’m not sure what they are thinking.
The government says they expect people to act like adults. It’s mind boggling to me that would be considered good public health policy.
I only read one brief article but I was surprised.
My sister lives there and she is appalled by the lack of proper public health policies in Sweden. She is working at home and made one of her daughters move out and go live with her Dad. That daughter wasn’t taking things seriously and wanted to keep going to the gym. The Dad is of a similar mindset and is in his mid-sixties so it’s particularly foolish for him.
This virus apparently transmits much more efficiently in more temperate climate. Infection rates are much lower in areas (including the Scandinavian countries) closer to the two poles and the equator.
It is only gone when there is either 100% quarantining and sheltering in place, or a vaccine. A safe vaccine isn’t coming until 2021, unless the FDA fast tracks potential solutions from Asia or Europe.
There is no certainty there will ever be a vaccine, let alone one in 2021. One can hope for that, but it’s likely we will have to have some return to normalcy in the absence of a vaccine.
Ugh, I’m not going to watch that since my dad has serious lung disease and my husband doesn’t have a spleen. I don’t want to know details.
My dad’s caregiver has serious symptoms now, including a cough. OMG. I’m trying not to panic.
The only positive is that we brought my son home from my parents’ house Wednesday instead of today as originally scheduled. If he had been there the last two nights, while this caregiver worked, I don’t think it would have been wise for him to fly home today. The lady works only Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, and DS had no contact with her at all last weekend. I will be nervous until he’s been here two weeks, though, since he was still in the house after she last worked.
We are on day 15 of house arrest. I feel like I’m a living version of the movie Ground Hog Day. Doesn’t help that the theme song from that movie is now stuck in my head.
I’m looking at my kitchen cabinets and thinking…maybe I’ll remove all the knobs, wash them and wash down the cabinetry today.
Are our privacy laws working against us at this time. We should be discussing a relaxation of HIPAA…the good of the many overrides the good of the one.
"The United States, he said, “has been slow in collecting data in a systematic way.”
Dr. C. Jason Wang, a researcher at Stanford University who has studied how Taiwan handled the coronavirus outbreak, said some of the measures taken in Taiwan would most likely not be accepted in the United States given privacy concerns. The government, for example, merged the airport immigration database with the national medical database so that doctors could immediately see if a patient had traveled out of the country.
But Wang said the proactive approach that Taiwan took to the virus, including aggressive tracing of cases, has helped keep the total number of confirmed infections — 283 on Saturday — much lower than experts initially expected. By comparison, the borough of Queens in New York City, with one-tenth the population of Taiwan, has 10,000 cases.
Some of the information being released to the public in Taiwan and Singapore would most likely be uncontroversial in the United States, he said. Taiwanese authorities, for example, have pointed out linkages between anonymized cases, including family clusters, in an effort to warn the public how easily the virus is transmitted within households.
Caplan of the NYU School of Medicine said it is paradoxical that the United States is providing less precise information to its citizens on the outbreak than Singapore, which puts limits on the spread of information through internet controls.
“Here we expect to get information so we have our choices and we make our decisions,” he said. “Our notion is information is the oxygen for democracy. Wouldn’t we want to receive more information than them?”
“U.S. Surgeon General calls Indianapolis an Emerging Hotspot”
Both the Washington Post US map of deaths by county and the map of where the phones pinged from FL spring break give me chills. Usually, it seems half of IN goes to FL for spring break, and it looks like far too many still went.
IN has still tested only 9830, maintaining a positive rate of 15% and a death rate of 2.1-2.5%. Rural hospitals are ill-equipped. Ours cut payroll 5%, dropped PRN and others’ hours, and asked for voluntary layoff within the last week.
