How are different parts of the world so different?!

[JC17fj74]

How are we all dealing with Covid so differently right now?
So far I've seen friends in Australia enjoying the 'normal' things in life such a beach days, meals out and drinks and cocktails in bars. Friends in America dining out in restaurants etc
And here we are in full shitty lockdown with no end date in sight.
Why are we so different over her?!
It's like the rest of the world has started to get back to normal and we are stuck in this nightmare 😫

Boris?

It’s almost like we have a piss poor government who don’t know their arse from their elbow.

Though, a serious answer...
It's summer there, many European countries enjoyed a relatively normal summer. People travelled, package tours happened, people went in holiday within the UK. Things are always worse for viruses in winter.

Schools open
No mandatory mask wearing
Over complicated rules that have no sense- a child can bubble with 300 in his school year (and by extension with every family of the 300) but can't go inside his Aunty's house....

Etc etc.

Summer there and winter in Europe.

India is back to "normal". Well, at least cases are falling. One could argue it's because the figures are fudged but there is a limit to how much you can do that. And hospitals have beds

The simple answer is it was never allowed to spread as much in Australia, and certainly not in New Zealand....for example NZ only had 2,256 cases (in total: OK I know its only a population of 5 million, but even then, that still isn't many cases), because they closed the borders early enough to stop too many carriers from getting in, then had good discipline during their first lockdown. With the US, its a big country, and some parts are arguably faring worse than the UK is just now, although many Americans are carrying on as if nothing happened, and in some states the state governments are allowing that.

Australia has it very much under control. No community transmission, and they are quarantining everyone that goes in. So they can have a normal life. They acted early and supressed the virus, so they saved thrmselves of the deaths, but they are quited isolated at present. Starting the vaccination program now. I wish we had done the same in Europe, but I think the virus was already spreading here when we heard of it.
USA, they have large amount of cases and hospitalisations, so I am puzzled that the restaurants are still open. Maybe the area where your friend is has lower numbers than the average?

Many other countries in the world are climbing up a steep curve at the moment. Europe is following UK on a steep climb. They seem to be a few weeks behind, but similar sharp increase. They are locking up again or they will soon enough.

I think the vaccination will be the key to coming out of this one for us.

Australia is carrying on as normal because it is not allowing covid in. America is carrying on as normal (SOME people- many are in self imposed sensible lockdown) and a shit load of people are dying. The opposite ends of the results of interventions or lack of

@JC17fj74

How are we all dealing with Covid so differently right now? So far I've seen friends in Australia enjoying the 'normal' things in life such a beach days, meals out and drinks and cocktails in bars. Friends in America dining out in restaurants etc And here we are in full shitty lockdown with no end date in sight. Why are we so different over her?! It's like the rest of the world has started to get back to normal and we are stuck in this nightmare 😫

It's because Boris is in league with the freemasons/aliens who just want everyone to be miserable - ask anyone.

Or it could be because it's easier to isolate Australia than the UK and that many US people value their freedom to go out for a meal to be more important than the lives of other people who are not them.

You know they have a curfew in France right? Hardly anyone is back to normal in the real world. People are dying all over the place and people are fed up because they had to skip cocktails and spending their time saying rubbish like "no end date in sight." when we've vaccinating people in the millions

We are not Australia perhaps take a look at some of our nearer European neighbours Spain France Italy and even Germany they must all have shit governments too

Some parts of America aren’t acting as normal - schools never reopened in some states for example.

We are in the middle of our winter so even without Covid in the mix we’d not be picnicking in the park or sunbathing on Bournemouth beach in January. We’ll be able to do that however in our summer months when huge numbers of our population is vaccinated and the weather is better. Australia may be looking at us then having a lovely time. Reading the Australian press, Their vaccine roll out is going to be pretty slow going as they don’t seem to want the Oxford vaccine and many prefer to wait for the pzfizer one but they’ve only ordered 10 million doses.

I find it interesting reading the threads re covid here as they are all divisive-everyone thinks their individual circumstances are so special they can avoid the (admittedly confusing and oft changed ) rules. Its absolutely shameful seeing the stats coming out of the UK.

We consider ourselves extremely fortunate to have quit the UK for in Australia a few years ago and covid has not touched our area..Ive had a promotion, moved house, and socialise like we always have.
Where I used to live it was months of stage4 lockdown and everyone just got on with it to the effect it turned it around within months
.
The problem is the UK is led by self interested, bumbling idiots (I mean really did covid take xmas day off when everyone went visiting??) and populated by too many people who genuinely dont seem to give a fuck and shun the regulations whilst "clapping for the NHS", banging pots(!)drawing bloody rainbow pictures whilst scheming for ways they can thwart the regulations to suit..

Put Boris to one side (please!), and take western Europe as a whole (UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium etc.). In general we have followed the same pattern of peaks and troughs, with some lags. All are inter-connected with large movements of goods and people.
You can say the same for the US and Mexico, the virus moves as people move. To compare if with somewhere (relatively) isolated as Australia and NZ is not a fair match.

Germany, France, Portugal and Turkey have lockdowns and heavy restrictions. I'd guess most countries do. Even Sweden has some restrictions. Do you mean to ignore our neighbours OP?

Reading the Australian press, Their vaccine roll out is going to be pretty slow going as they don’t seem to want the Oxford vaccine and many prefer to wait for the pzfizer one but they’ve only ordered 10 million doses

That’s concerning. The best time to get going with vaccinations would be their summer and then hopefully their winter would be much better than the last. I hope they don’t miss this opportunity and end up with a winter season like ours.

My feelings aren’t completely selfless, I want to see the impact of mass vaccinations going into a winter because it gives us an idea of what’s ahead.

'We are not Australia perhaps take a look at some of our nearer European neighbours Spain France Italy and even Germany they must all have shit governments too'

Exactly. It is so tedious to read the 'it's all Johnson's fault' crap when Scotland, Wales and NI (devolved administrations doing their own thing) are in the same tragic boat and yes, Europe too.

I know mn isn't renowned for critical thinking but really, let's think about demographics population size, geographic location (isolated anyone?) and the all important population density.

It's true that all of Europe as far as I can see is hardly Covid free.
Italy's figures for example (these are published daily and are pretty exhaustive)
Yesterday:
16, 310 new cases from 260, 704 tests, bringing confirmed current positive cases to 557, 717.
You then of course have to factor, like in every country, how many more people haven't been tested because they are asymptomatic and don't even know they have Covid...
Friends in Spain and Portugal have restrictions.

I think the biggest difference (when all this is over) will be a lack of logical restrictions in some places.

@DianaT1969

Germany, France, Portugal and Turkey have lockdowns and heavy restrictions. I'd guess most countries do. Even Sweden has some restrictions. Do you mean to ignore our neighbours OP?

I think the main difference (imho) is those governments seem to have a much lower threshold for enacting tougher restrictions. I can’t see Germany waiting until 40k/50k cases per day to start implementing more.

'Put Boris to one side (please!), and take western Europe as a whole (UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium etc.). In general we have followed the same pattern of peaks and troughs, with some lags. All are inter-connected with large movements of goods and people.'

Yes the op would have a point if our neighbours were having a lovely lockdown free time with hardly any cases but we are all in the same desperate situation. We've also got the superspreading variant to contend with.

For goodness sake those that say put aside Boris and stop comparing this island nation with another island nation, what are you on about?
The fact that our borders were open for most of the year is laughable. They are porous between the home nations too.

Daily deaths in the UK are at a peak at the moment (red line) and are now set to gradually decline into the spring. If you look at the chart you will see that many other countries had higher peaks at different points. Slovakia is the worst at the moment with 2.32 deaths per 100,000 population compared to 0.94 in the UK. Portugal is also high at 1.58.

I think you would have a point OP, if your only examples weren't literally the other side of the world. All the countries near us, who are in the same season incidentally, are in a very similar situation.

Most European nations are in a similar situation. They are the ones Britain should be compared to, not countries like NZ and Oz.

@CornishPastyDownUnder

I find it interesting reading the threads re covid here as they are all divisive-everyone thinks their individual circumstances are so special they can avoid the (admittedly confusing and oft changed ) rules. Its absolutely shameful seeing the stats coming out of the UK.

We consider ourselves extremely fortunate to have quit the UK for in Australia a few years ago and covid has not touched our area..Ive had a promotion, moved house, and socialise like we always have.
Where I used to live it was months of stage4 lockdown and everyone just got on with it to the effect it turned it around within months
.
The problem is the UK is led by self interested, bumbling idiots (I mean really did covid take xmas day off when everyone went visiting??) and populated by too many people who genuinely dont seem to give a fuck and shun the regulations whilst "clapping for the NHS", banging pots(!)drawing bloody rainbow pictures whilst scheming for ways they can thwart the regulations to suit..

Do you know why their is such anti Oxford vaccine in Aus? I was reading the Sydney herald yesterday and most of the comments are along the lines of why they are getting the inferior vaccine ( meaning the Oxford one) and how it would not give them herd immunity etc. Is that a general worry there? Will people generally refuse the Oxford vaccine do you know? There seems to be accusations of cronyism against Scott Morrison that government ministers have shares in Astra Zeneca? Not sure if that is actually true? It’ll be interesting ( for me anyway ) to watch what happens.