You thought there were many areas of the world that overcome COVID-19? Think again, especially in European countries. A number of key European countries called COVID-19 victory a bit too early, among the most iconic examples are the Czech Republic, Germany, and France.
In the United States, things are getting worse, but it’s not totally unanticipated. In my local area of Minnesota, for example, we never called “victory,” but we did encourage a gradual reopening at what looked like nearing the saturation of COVID-19 infections. So, what exactly is happening in Minnesota? I’d say the big thing is that we knew we didn’t have good testing early on, so we were relying on assumptions around the under-estimates from official reported cases encompassing a much larger representation of the population. Well, now we do have better testing, 40% of the state population tested, and apparently a significant number of people have already contracted COVID-19 before the recent week.
But the central crux of the issue is this: when we are nearby the halfway point, whether we are past it or before it, any small changes in circumstantial situations mean that we can quickly end up with a large swing in Coronavirus infections. And that’s exactly what we’re observing. Now, we have a flash flood of COVID-19 cases at a record high threatening to exceed our hospital COVID-19 surge capacity. It’s just that, when you are dealing with population-wide phenomena, you have to admit that our hospital systems are totally unequipped to deal with issues this large, and that is fundamental because you can’t financially sustain some types of such large disaster preparation resources like staffing of registered nurses on every ordinary year.
What was the tiny circumstantial change that lead up to this surge? I think, in hindsight, yes, it’s the weather. Cooler climates, COVID-19 lasts a bit longer in the air. Correspondingly, increased use of climate control systems that minimize air exchanges with the outdoors to minimize the amount of energy that must be spent to heat the air. And, simply the fact that the outdoors are less pleasurable, yes people are spending more time, especially for social gatherings, indoors. That means COVID-19 air with sufficient viral load to infect is more of a problem. Just that, remember, yes, the effect of weather on infections is always delayed by 1-2 weeks, that’s how long it takes to become symptomatic. This is also why I was confused in the spring trying to understand if the weather really did have that big of an effect or if it was just that COVID-19 was running out of other places to spread to in Minnesota.
So, yeah, here we are, but in many European and American areas, we have the particular additional problem of “lockdown fatigue.” Many people just can’t stand lockdowns because of so many years of their past lifestyle, that, that, that… honestly they really don’t care about the potential risk they play in being a leading spreader of Coronavirus from their lifestyle. To be punctual, these are people who are like, “Hey, if I can’t live a party life, I might as well not live at all… and heck I don’t care that this demon virus will snuff away the life of 100 other people before taking my own life.”
I’m not making up that last part about people being like that, literally a friend of my father had a college roommate with diabetes who absolutely just hated the idea of not being able to party into drunk night stupors and hangovers like all the other college kids because of his condition. He didn’t live until the end of the school year. Before Coronavirus, there were already literally thousands of people just like this.
20201104/https://www.startribune.com/twin-cities-icu-space-at-red-alert-as-virus-cases-hit-record/572970942/
20201104/DuckDuckGo czech republic covid-19
20201104/https://www.thedailybeast.com/czech-republic-goes-full-trump-with-covid-gets-crushed-by-second-wave
20201104/https://www.thedailybeast.com/switzerlands-yodeling-concerts-have-created-one-of-europes-worst-covid-hot-spots?ref=scroll
20201104/https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-national-guard-assists-czech-republic-sounds-covid-19-n1245444
20201104/DuckDuckGo france covid-19
20201104/https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/10/france-germany-announce-new-covid-19-lockdowns
20201104/https://www.france24.com/en/france/20201027-hard-choices-as-france-considers-new-covid-19-clampdown
But, what about South Korea? Well, they, as always, are coming back strong. Never once since they wielded control over the Coronavirus spreading for the first time did they let off in their vigilance to restrict the spread. They always had a contigency plan in place for controlling the risk of a new outbreak. So, when a new outbreak did come about in August, they were able to quickly stave that off before it got too bad, and they keep marching on without missing a beat.
20201104/DuckDuckGo south korea covid-19
20201104/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Korea
But, seriously, we really have to think about that conundrum of cultures. The fact that we have clusters of people in our world, where literally millions of people are ill-equipped to deal with this kind of virus, touted to strike at all of American’s weak points, and on the converse, millions of people who are exceptionally well prepared to deal with the virus. And, in each of those communities, there are cultural minorities who are more and less prepared respectively to deal with the virus.
Now, finally, we aren’t finished on this COVID-19 subject dissection yet. What about the kid perspective on all this happening in the adult politics world? Well, this is a great time to remind parents that children are usually more robust than they are given credit for. This is a time where “bogeymen” are scaring the adults big time but many children are adapting into their current state of affairs quite well. Namely, by finding ways to enjoy their time.
But not only that, the fact that they are not being literally shipped around to workshops operated adult specialists? They are finding more free time on their hands to think on their own, be bored, be curious, learn about the world and play around on their own initiative in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the year before now.
20201104/https://letgrow.org/pandemic-fatigue
Most importantly, most young children are simply not being active participants in the COVID-19 disease spreading equation, unlike the world of teenagers and young adults, who are the world’s leading spreaders of COVID-19. Most notably, most young children don’t have trouble with the idea of being forced to stick to their local community in social matters, being limited to only their immediate family members and next-door neighbors in social interaction. Even further than that, within those limits, believe it or not, most young children do a pretty good job when it comes to keeping sufficient personal space between them and their peers.
That’s also another good touch-point to mention. It should be intuitively obvious the reason why COVID-19 spreading is so bad among young adults, but I should state this explicitly to be punctually factual. COVID-19 spreads best when people share the same air from one breath to the next, which can happen very easily when you hug another person. Sure, so teenagers and young adults want to build more intimate relationships than younger children, so they’re getting closer more often. But, here’s the crux. The crux is that they often fail to build lasting such relationships due to character flaws, so they break up and promptly start again with another person, assuming it was just that they weren’t the right match. But now that’s beyond the point, the point is that they’re putting themselves in a social situation where COVID-19 can spread very easily from one to the next in their peer group.
Then, once teenagers and young adults catch COVID-19 from their peers, typically their next point of intimate contact is their own parents. So, the COVID-19 age demographic curves in some places, South Korea to name one, tend to look “bimodal,” there is a large peak for young adults and a smaller peak for adults of age 40-50, i.e. their parents. But for adults of the age 30-40, there is a curious trough.