
The Results of Europe’s Lockdown Experiment Are In - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-coronavirus-europe-lockdown-excess-deaths-recession
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qwerty123457
Restrictions don't do much when it's too late. If they are implemented early,
everything goes well.

Compare: italy, turkey with greece

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jobigoud
Something I find interesting, the excess mortality charts in the article only
go down to zero but if you go to the euroMOMO website you will see that for
France and Spain we are well into the negatives. France is almost at a score
of -10 which is a lot lower than any historic data.

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starpilot
> But, as our next chart shows, there’s little correlation between the
> severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess
> fatalities

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gumby
Without the context that extract is at best misleading. The article continues,

> The overall impression is that while restrictions on movement were seen as a
> necessary tool to halt the spread of the virus, _when and how they were
> wielded was more important than their severity_. Early preparation, and
> plentiful health-care resources, were enough for several countries to avoid
> draconian lockdowns. Germany, with better testing and contact tracing and
> more intensive care units than its neighbors, could afford to keep the
> economy a bit more open. Greece, by acting quickly and surely, appears to
> have avoided the worst, so far. (Emphasis mine)

The other related conclusion from the article Is that countries like Italy
needed more extreme measures because they lacked the rest of the necessary
infrastructure. That lack was not a wealth issue as the example of Greece
shows.

The US, with its second tier medical system and laggy response, seems likely
to require an Italy response rather than that a Germany/Greece one.

There’s an additional interesting conclusion that suggests that the high level
of economic integration means the economic pain will continue to be spread
around even among the better responders as their markets and suppliers will be
suffering no matter how well they did themselves.

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ralusek
AFAIK the US isn't faring particularly worse than most European countries.
Especially if you remove New York, the perception of the US as having had
uniquely bad outcomes seem pretty unfounded. And if you focus on individual
states, states like California responded very early and have absurdly low
cases per capita.

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starpilot
Yes. Seoul is South Korea, but NYC is not the USA. A full lockdown for super
dense areas, but looser everywhere else.

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rurban
If a lockdown would make sense. As you see with the data, it didn't. Hygiene
measures could be much more effective.

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gumby
With which data? This article reaches the opposite conclusion.

