Which country has decided to do life as usual and ignore COVID19 and what is the result?

kimani wrote:

And I'd much rather have coronavirus (don't have it as far as I know) than be kidnapped and held for ransom (has happened to me, not fun).

HOLD UP. WHAT...?

Please tell this story; which frankly is far more interesting than anything to do with the coronavirus

I've also been following Sweden because I trust that they are being as accurate as possible with their data. I don't think they have great testing since their case fatality rate is about 8.5%. Not too much news on the Healthcare capacity there, but they've been recording about 1 death per 100,000 per day for the last 2 days. In USA equivalent terms that would be 3,300 deaths per day. I think the next 2 weeks will be key to seeing if infections and death continue to spike and how bad the health system strain becomes (assuming they don't put stricter measures in place).

On the other hand, I've read that a lot of Swedes are already being cautious about hand washing and social distancing, even in the absence of Govt. mandates, but they certainly have more liberty than here in the States. Depending on if it works well, that gives me hope for being able to reopen things a bit more the US.

innohurry wrote:

Turkmenistan is going to be an interesting sample.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52186521

If you believe the dictator running the country

Rhodium Nights wrote:

kimani wrote:

And I'd much rather have coronavirus (don't have it as far as I know) than be kidnapped and held for ransom (has happened to me, not fun).

HOLD UP. WHAT...?

Please tell this story; which frankly is far more interesting than anything to do with the coronavirus

I second this. Kimani please entertain us with the kidnapping story

Rhodium Nights wrote:

What about Iceland? Only 6 deaths in the whole country. I doubt they shut too much down, except tourism probably. Haven't researched it though

Maybe you should have researched it just a bit. Early and aggressive, widespread testing. Early measures to contain.

It is almost like they followed best practices public health recommendations and they worked.

realism smacks you in the mouth wrote:

Rhodium Nights wrote:

What about Iceland? Only 6 deaths in the whole country. I doubt they shut too much down, except tourism probably. Haven't researched it though

Maybe you should have researched it just a bit. Early and aggressive, widespread testing. Early measures to contain.

It is almost like they followed best practices public health recommendations and they worked.

I researched the amount of total deaths.

Good for Iceland.

Rhodium Nights wrote:

realism smacks you in the mouth wrote:

Maybe you should have researched it just a bit. Early and aggressive, widespread testing. Early measures to contain.

It is almost like they followed best practices public health recommendations and they worked.

I researched the amount of total deaths.

Good for Iceland.

Unfortunately it is too late to follow those practices in most countries.

It seems like the CDC recommends people traveling to Brazil take some kind of antimalarial medication. Do citizens have any kind of antimalarial schedule?

Have you been following the number of congressmen who are being investigated for selling stock before all of these shutdowns? The number is growing by the day. How about Bill Gates? Follow the vaccine trail. Ever wonder how most politicians who enter office with a net worth of $100k leave with a net worth of $10m?

If Sweden had kept business as usual, it would have continued to have massive travel and tourism. To what extent was that even possible when virtually every other major country had shut down travel to other countries? Considering that many Swedes still have stayed home on their own, how is it a true test?

Tanzania has actively promoted large assemblies, especially religious, to defeat the "Satan plague." Apparently there has been little testing for the virus and the figures for hospitalizations and deaths are not thought to be credible. So it will likely not be known if that strategy is reasonable.

Check the status of the various states. The ones with the most severe lockdowns have the most cases. The ones where people are outside running and playing golf and tennis, have seen few cases.

jhgbfvtg wrote:

Is there a country in the world that decided to do absolutely nothing and treat it like any other contagious disease?

Or did every country basically follow the same recipe?

I know that Sweden has done less dramatic changes, but their streets are still pretty empty I believe.

I assume that Sentinel Island has not made any changes.

Other than them?

The best way to see what would happen if a country did nothing is to look at smaller areas where COVID-19 swept through and infected a large fraction of the population before there were any shutdown actions. So Bergamo, Italy for example rather than Italy as a whole, or Wuhan rather than China as a whole. In Bergamo, the normal weekly death rate from all cases per 100,000 is about 19. It was 112 in March, so almost 10x normal. It will be interesting to see what fraction of Bergamo was infected using antibody tests.

zzzz wrote:

In Bergamo, the normal weekly death rate from all cases per 100,000 is about 19. It was 112 in March, so almost 10x normal.

Oops, I mean almost 5x normal.

seattle dude wrote:

Rhodium Nights wrote:

HOLD UP. WHAT...?

Please tell this story; which frankly is far more interesting than anything to do with the coronavirus

I second this. Kimani please entertain us with the kidnapping story

Well, it's letsrun appropriate, as it occurred on my morning run. I live in the mountains outside Mexico City and go for about a 10k run every morning around 7:30. The first and last kilometer is quite rural, a dirt road with some houses and cornfields, then the second (and penultimate) km is parallel to the freeway, just like 20 feet to the side, then I do laps on a soccer field. So on January 7 of this year I do all that, everything's fine, I'm coming back, and like...700 meters from my house (so in the sparsely populated last km) I got jumped.

Actually, I was just running along and a car pulled out of a driveway slash tiny dead end road right as I was coming up to it and turned toward me, which kind of broke (or honed?) my focus. I was running very much to the right side of the road to make way for the car, and right after it passed, some random guy appeared in front of me. There are a few people who walk or run around here so I didn't think anything of it and just moved to the other side of the road and kept going. About...30 meters? later there's a fork in the road and I saw two guys, one at each fork, just kind of waiting, and they started running toward me saying, "That's him, that's the guy, get him!" and things of that sort.

I started freaking out and I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I'm assuming I started running faster and I was looking for a way to evade them, obviously. I had a whole plan so as not to lead them to my house. But as I was running and trying to map out a route, I was running way out off the edge of the road, and people leave trash and stuff there, and I stepped on something (after going back, I'm pretty sure it was a toilet) pretty ferociously and it effed up my foot and leg pretty bad, though it didn't really register in the moment. I kind of remember letting out a cry and the two guys closed in on me right then and I went to the ground to try to cover myself from blows. In hindsight it was probably more so because of getting injured. So these two guys grab me, I make an attempt to get out, they grab me again, I'm about to try to escape once more and the guy I had passed right after the car comes panting into the scene waving a gun and saying he'll blow my brains out, yadda yadda.

At this point I'm thinking it's a case of mistaken identity and they want to beat my ass in retaliation for something someone else did (mainly because of them yelling that I was the guy, when I'm definitely not "the guy" for anything involving criminal retaliation). And now I had to change my mentality and try to figure out how to minimize damage, since I was pretty much letting them get me into a car, so I decided to be as cooperative as possible.

So these three guys put a jacket over my head and force me into an old VW bug. They said a bunch of threatening things that didn't make much sense, then I asked if they were doing this for money. They said yes, they wanted some absurd amount of money, then asked how much I was worth. I said like a couple hundred bucks.

They drove around for a while, then asked for my dad's number. I said I didn't have a dad. They asked for my mom's number and I said I didn't have it, that she didn't live here. They asked what that meant and I decided to say she lived in the US and that I was American, which was a dangerous move but luckily worked out fine. I told them I lived with my wife and mother-in-law and that was it. I of course considered just not giving them any information but I was doing some on-the-fly calculations and figured they have nothing to gain by killing me, but if I piss them off (not giving them someone with whom to negotiate would certainly piss them off) my chances of being killed would go up to maybe 50% and my chances of incurring an ass whipping would get pretty close to 100.

They said we were going to a safe house where they could hold me all day or all week, so I figured torture would be pretty likely. Plus, I figured my wife was going to be freaking out regardless, and knowing I was kidnapped might even be better than having no idea where I was or what was going on. So I gave them my cell phone number and told them my wife would check it at some point after noticing I was gone for too long. At this point they also tied my hands together behind my back and tied my legs together. And one guy was pretty worried about my ankle, though I had no idea what he was talking about.

So probably a couple hours after jumping me they finally made contact with my wife. As I'm sure you can imagine, hearing someone you love freaking out on the phone while talking to some f--kheads who jumped you and threw you in the back of a car sucks major ass. Shortly after this they gave me like three sips of soda (I asked for water and they found that strange and impossible to grant). And then I'm just basically blindfolded in the back of a car (three different cars, we changed cars twice) for hours on end while they occasionally communicate with my wife. At one point they shot the gun to make a point, but it scared them more than me and they ended up leaving the spot we had been at for hours because they thought people were coming. I realized pretty quickly that these guys were very amateur. They were not working for any head honcho (as they claimed) and they definitely didn't have a safe house. They ran out of gas and had to push the car at one point. And they kept changing the story--I started by saying I was poor and my only contact is my wife and kept that story the whole time.

Luckily, my wife went to the Anti-Kidnapping Unit pretty quickly and had everything under control. I talked to her on the second call and she was freaking out and saying they were asking for a lot of money but all that mattered was that I was OK, which, of course, but I knew that was the wrong outlook, the wrong thing to say. Then I talked to her again on the third or fourth call and she was super calm and just kept saying "We don't have the money, you know there's no money." Which on the ego side of things was kind of worrisome, a small part of me believed her and was like, I know you can get the money, but the logical part of me, which luckily took up a much larger slice of brain, was ecstatic at hearing this, and I knew she was with someone calm and wise, though I had no idea it was a specialized police force.

So I left for my run at like 7:30 and was kidnapped around 8 am and finally at like 10 pm I had to pee and they told me to just piss right there in the backseat. At this point we were just parked outside a house or something, I could hear women and children and cooking. At about 11pm they said everything was handled and they were going to drop me off and people would come for me. Three guys got in and we drove for like 15 minutes, they leaned me out of the car, untied me, and told me to just run straight ahead. I was blindfolded and still in my running shorts and shirt and socks. They took my shoes, wedding ring, watch and gloves. And it was about 30 degrees. So I ran like 15 steps, stopped, took off my blindfold, and tried to figure out where I was. Some Godforsaken cornfield. I found a street sign and figured out I was in my neighborhood (colony), so I started looking for society. A few minutes later a friend picked me up.

I couldn't run for a month because of my foot/leg, lost some easily replaced running stuff and my wedding band, pissed my pants, and had to pay about $1,500, but aside from that it was pretty harmless. Luckily the guys were total amateurs and we could've negotiated them down even lower. After I was back with my wife I learned that like 30 people were involved, she alerted all kinds of family members and had all kinds of money lined up, luckily the anti-kidnapping agents kept everyone's heads on straight and had my wife negotiate and play poor and try to run out the clock. But still, I wouldn't recommend the experience.

"Not too much news on the Healthcare capacity there"

What does that tell you? Find a Swedish forum and ask people who live there. Or look up some Swedish websites, like personal blogs and such and ask people who live there.

I've been there. I'm glad I don't live there during a time like this. On absence of that it's a paradise in the summer! Still you should know where the private clinics are relative to where you are staying.

Ggggg wrote:

Sweden kept business almost as usual. Nothing happened. Big surprise. Read this and figure out how stupid the rest of world is locking down healthy people

If we add the population of Norway and Finland we have the population of Sweden.

Sweden have 800 dead

Norway + Finland 150

Not Canada, where the PM is on tv every day and fear and panic seem to have overtaken the media.

Great story, thanks