> ... the French and the Spanish and Italians and the UK all had disastrous outbreaks as well, but as Eastern Europe and other places have shown, it didn't need to be that way.
The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already).
Some cities and countries had lots of travel in Week 9 (Week of feb 24) because of holidays. This is e.g. All of Belgium, and the Stockholm region in Sweden.
In Sweden its striking how much better regions that had the holiday just one week later fared (e.g. Sweden's second and third largest cities).
Obviously an initial/seed outbreak of 5000 infected people in a city, compared to an initial outbreak of 50 people will be very different.
It's like commentators on this particular subject assume this diseases was distributed evenly across all countries and the outcomes after that depends on the mitigations
applied...
It's also peculiar how some routes didn't incur a lot of spread but others did. E.g. compare the travel from the Italian alps to Scandinavia - tons of people infected. But packed high speed trains between Lombardy and Rome left several times per day during the time when lots were infected but no lockdowns were in place, yet Rome managed with a lot less disease. No one can really explain that yet. Is it something about how the virus spreads that makes planes worse than trains? Is it something about the particular population in Rome having had a Coronavirus cold last season that Lombardy didn't? Who knows.
People coming from Italy (for instance) were not asked to quarantine or even informed that it might be a good idea to self quarantine for two weeks.
Nothing. This initial non-response might alone explain the Stockholm outbreak.
Edit:
someone could have greeted arriving travellers at the airport with a pamphlet. This would have made a huge difference without having to adjust actual policy. Etc, etc. There could have been so many things done which were not done.
They were informed, but the information was "if you show symptoms you should stay home", not "since you are returning from italy you should stay home". This was based on info from Italian authorities that ski resorts were not big hotspots like other places in the region.
It was a cheap thing to do out of caution. But I guess, it's not in the culture to "over"-react. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it comes back to bite you.
I think the disease took a back door from the travellers (who got the information and probably were pretty careful) to taxi drivers and other people who met even the most sick travellers, then from taxi drivers to other occupations common in those suburbs including elderly care. So unfortunately I think among the first to be infected where the families of taxi drivers, who often work in elderly homes or in home care. This was very early even before the elderly homes were completely locked down.
> The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already).
But that was absolutely a part of government response. In Romania, isolation of travelers from Italy and China began on February 21st, before any confirmed cases. Travel and meeting restrictions started when we hit 10 total cases. The lockdown measures increased significantly when we hit 100 total cases. This was in the same time that France was holding general elections with a few thousand cases.
> isolation of travelers from Italy and China began on February 21st, before any confirmed cases.
I think that was the case everywhere. What didn't work was that it wasn't just Italy (Wuhan was almost no travellers compared to Northern italy that had many thousands in that worst week alone).
Part of the problem was that a) While the travellers were told to isolate, especially if they had symptoms, you had Taxi drivers that took people from the airport who were already sick, caught the disease. It then exploded in the areas where taxi drivers live (where people live in very crowded apartments and often don't speak good swedish etc) and b) that it apparently came from many more places e.g. the US, Spain, France etc already at that time.
In hindsight, there should have been clear messaging that anyone returning from italy and several other locations should isolate, regardless of whether they had symptoms, and that they shouldn't take taxis or public transport when returning from the airport.
That's easier said than done though - if you do that you risk having thousands of sick people carrying skis, sitting at the airport not sure how to get home. That doesn't help either. So in hindsight, authorities should have arranged transports for these people too. But now as you can see it's becoming a pretty complex operation.
The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already).
Some cities and countries had lots of travel in Week 9 (Week of feb 24) because of holidays. This is e.g. All of Belgium, and the Stockholm region in Sweden.
In Sweden its striking how much better regions that had the holiday just one week later fared (e.g. Sweden's second and third largest cities).
Obviously an initial/seed outbreak of 5000 infected people in a city, compared to an initial outbreak of 50 people will be very different.
It's like commentators on this particular subject assume this diseases was distributed evenly across all countries and the outcomes after that depends on the mitigations applied...
It's also peculiar how some routes didn't incur a lot of spread but others did. E.g. compare the travel from the Italian alps to Scandinavia - tons of people infected. But packed high speed trains between Lombardy and Rome left several times per day during the time when lots were infected but no lockdowns were in place, yet Rome managed with a lot less disease. No one can really explain that yet. Is it something about how the virus spreads that makes planes worse than trains? Is it something about the particular population in Rome having had a Coronavirus cold last season that Lombardy didn't? Who knows.