I’ve taken the liberty of adding a trend line to better show how we’ve managed to flatten the curve.
EDIT: Wait, I don’t get that graph actually - what’s on the left y axis? Number of tests performed daily in New Taipei? I didn’t look at the numbers before, just incorrectly assumed it was showing number of cases.
I so wish they would quit using the words New Taipei City it’s just confusing and misleading.
New Taipei City is a big area spread out encircling, surrounding and separating different places.
It’s a totally illogical way to define this virus spread.
They need to specify Banciao and other locations.
Is really a disservice and damaging to everyone to use the term New Taipei City without specifying exact locations.
How much weight does this hold when there are still 40,000 + tests that haven’t been processed?
I guess it’s a trend of reported cases and those tested, but not true representation of situation.
Grandstanding? The article mentioned that Taiwan immediately agreed to replace “our country” by “Taiwan”. That was after the contract had been finalized. Regardless, a week later, they were informed that the contract would be delayed.
Looks to me like Taiwan did not, in this case, prefer pride over results.
Jackson Pollock meets Covid
Thanks for posting this. Clearly, we’re moving in the right direction. But does this factor in the closure of the tea houses? If not, the curve could be flattening even faster than the graphic shows.
If there was a lockdown that would limit the chance of them catching COVID in the first place.
These people are going out to work, then coming home and spreading it to their 10 family members.
It doesn’t take a genius to see how lockdown limits the spread.
Yes, I know. That’s why “lockdowns” don’t work.
If you want to prevent absolutely everyone going to work, have fun with that, but I’ll be on the next boat out before people start cooking and eating their relatives.
If you could put everyone in an isolation pod and hook them up to a drip of nutrients and opium for a month, you could eradicate the virus. But that’s not how lockdowns work in reality.
Australia has had one of the tightest border controls of any country and Melbourne is on its 4th lockdown already.
I think lockdowns are appealing in principle but they haven’t led to permanent eradication of the virus anywhere because humans. We’re social animals and we can’t afford to shut down civilization for extended periods of time.
Its a trade off, when the numbers of infected are overwhelming the country’s resources to deal with them lockdown works as a way to slow down the spread.
The alternative is worse. This stuff ain’t rocket science.
As someone said back there, it didn’t happen to other countries, so why would you expect that to happen here? About the only countries that really struggled were those that were hit hard and early, like Italy.
Yes, Taiwan has been supremely complacent about getting ready for the inevitable, but the emerging news is that they haven’t been doing nothing at all. It’ll be very hard on medical staff for a while, and I think they really need to start training people up to provide auxiliary support, but there’s absolutely no reason that things should “collapse”.
And unfortunately, it is rocket science.
I’m gonna change my tune—now it’s here, we don’t need tier 4. It’s not gonna be stamped out. Might as well stick to Tier 3 so people have a modicum of comfort still, with a focus on getting big offices to wfh.
Tier 4 won’t stamp it out now. The cat is out of the bag. It would have worked early on. But shutting every single thing down will do nowt now other than make people depressed and angry for 2 weeks.
Keep it as is–cases seem level, and ride it out until we’re vaccinated. At this point, a lockdown will do nothing. It’s too late. A level 4 lockdown was needed as soon as it was clear it was in the community.
Well TW has what 6,000 cases now and according to the news, the hospitals are already overwhelmed. So it’s going to be a shit show all around. Closing offices will have an impact on the spread of the virus but it will totally kill the economy. Pick your poison. One way or another the virus messes everything up.
Ugly days ahead until TW can get enough people vaxxed.
Early in the pandemic, some of the answers provided by public officials — who were scrambling to track the disease as it overwhelmed health systems — fed skepticism. Last April, Deborah Birx, MD, coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said this when asked about people who have COVID-19 but die from preexisting conditions: “If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”
That statement, combined with some state health officials saying they follow the same policy, sparked charges that the COVID-19 totals were inflated by deaths from other diseases and even auto accidents if the victims happened to have COVID-19. Federal and state governments gradually altered such policies over the spring and summer to say that in order for a death to be counted as a COVID-19 death, the disease had to have played a role.
And continuing:
“COVID-19 can cause an extraordinarily wide range of clinical complications,” Auld says. “While pneumonia and respiratory failure are the most common manifestations, it can also cause blood clots, including strokes and heart attacks.”
When a COVID-19 patient dies, “it’s usually a cascade of events that lead to death — it’s not one thing,” agrees Daniel Handel, MD, MBA, MPH, chief medical officer for Indiana University Health’s South Central Region in Bloomington.
In addition, the disease’s brutal impact on people with other medical conditions — such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart ailments — can make COVID-19 one of several contributors to a death, says Sally Aiken, MD, chief medical examiner of Spokane County, Washington. Aiken has seen cases where elderly people who were in advanced decline due to Alzheimer’s disease and atrial fibrillation contracted COVID-19 and soon died.
[…]
“There always have been cases where there are gray areas of death certification,” says Aiken, immediate past president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.
COVID-19 cases can paint lots of gray. In an instructional video for filling out death certificates in cases that might or might not be attributed to COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises health professionals to “use your best clinical judgment.”
[…]
Others, however, have no COVID-19 symptoms or previous diagnosis. For those who die — from a heart attack, for instance — the role of COVID-19 might never be determined unless there’s a reason to run a post-mortem test for the disease, Raja explains. As for those killed by traumas such as accidents and assaults, a test wouldn’t matter.
Start fining the old bats walking around maskless. That I agree with. They get away with too much.
Pop a mask on, gramps, or its 15k down the pan.
Outside? When nobody is around? What’s the point? Except being righteous.
If the people who are most vulnerable want to take their chances and they end up coughing into the afterlife, what’s the problem?
