David's Covid Diaries

                                                  Mainly from New York Times   Some things were remarkably similar: the main medical treatments in 1918 were social distancing, hand washing and face masks, combined with school closures.   Careful records were made during ‘Spanish flu’, but this came in three waves over the next 2 years.   But there the similarities end – people unaffected by   the pandemic were not anxious about other healthy people, and there were no tests for the organism responsible.   In New York the alleged organism was in fact a bacterium, called haemophilus influenzae. A vaccine mistakenly targeted this organism. The organism actually responsible was the H1N1 influenza virus, and...

  An earlier blog first looked at the Scandinavian countries , providing the UK as a sort of   ‘out of Scandinavia’ control.       Norway Sweden Finland Denmark        (UK) Blog 9: 16 th May             Covid Cases/M 8.1 67.6 19.6 22.3 80 Covid death/M 0.25 10.6 0.8 1.1 8.9   Dr. Anders Tagnell, Sweden’s epidemiologist, argued that left to themselves, ‘by end of May 40% of population of Stockholm would have had the virus, and any upswing of morbidity will be quite low’. Sweden is a huge country with a small, thinly distributed population. Dr Tagnell became a hero to teenagers in Sweden, and I hoped he’d have some luck with such an interest...

This blog will take the US state with the lowest case load of the virus (Vermont) and compare it with places in the world with really low prevalence as well. Can anything be learned about other places?     Size Populn. in millions Density of populn. Gini Index Median      age Life expect. Ethnicity most common, 2 nd .3 rd United States 328M 35.7/K 2 -41 38.2 78.9              W63%,H15%,B13% Vermont 0.62M 24.9/K 2 .45   42.7           80.5             W93%; As2%.B1.4% Vietnam 95.5M 33.1/K 2 .36 30.5 75.1 Kinh 1.4M; Tay .8M ...