United Kingdom v Belarus - Belarus No Lockdowns & No mandatory masks

https://twitter.com/respect65/status...09392557846536

interesting

whats belarus (Byelorussian) doing right where UK is not???
no mask requirement, no lockdowns.

looks like they just treated it as another flu season.

I believe the statistics are really skewed based on wether they had underlying conditions. It seems like majority that have underlying conditions would have probably eventually succumb to those conditions or even if they just caught the flue as well. The amount of testing and how results are processed seem to have no controls to filter out repetition. I know of people that have tested positive multiple times and each test probably recorded as a additional case.

So comparing a country with the approximate number of people as the city of London is somehow supposed to mean something. Dumb dumb dumb.

Population density matters in a disease that is passed by people breathing near one another.

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Covid-19: How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe?
BMJ 2020; 370 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3543 (Published 15 September 2020)
Cite this as: BMJ 2020;370:m3543
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Kata Karáth
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katakarath@gmail.com
Plagued by political turmoil over “Europe’s last dictatorship” and with a president in denial of covid-19, how has Belarus ended up with one of the lowest death rates on the continent? Kata Karáth reports

Belarus’s beleaguered government remains unfazed by covid-19. President Aleksander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has flatly denied the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to impose a lockdown, close schools, or cancel mass events like the Belarusian football league or the Victory Day parade.

Yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe—just over 700 in a population of 9.5 million with over 73 000 confirmed cases.

Pandemic mindset
The relatively low death rate is thought to be thanks to Belarus’s large hospital capacity which allowed the country to isolate people early on, says Andrei Vitushka, a healthcare policy expert at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies in Vilnius, Lithuania.

With 11 hospital beds per 1000 people, Belarus outnumbers nations like Germany (8) or the UK (2.5).1 “It’s usually a problem because it takes a lot of money to maintain them, but it turned into our advantage in this situation,” says Vitushka, who is also an intensive care physician in Belarus.

“Belarus, like most of the post-Soviet states, has a focus on “sanitary epidemiological problems” meaning large scale health scares like a pandemic,” says Rasmus Nilsson, a teaching fellow at University College London’s school of Slavonic and east European studies.

This may be one reason Belarus also outperformed most of Europe in terms of mass testing during the first four months of the pandemic. While many countries were reluctant to carry out extensive testing, according to the state owned news agency BelTA, testing in Belarus started as early as 23 January. Most kits were donated or purchased from China and Russia2 using government funds and donations from companies3 and ordinary citizens.4 The country stepped up testing in early April,5 developing its own rapid testing kits6 and switching to the use of domestically produced reagents for polymerase chain reaction testing in May.7 According to government information, there are now 32 laboratories processing samples across the country and testing is widespread in hospitals as well as from GPs.

By the end of June, Belarus had conducted around one million tests,8 covering more than 10% of its population.

Citizens doing it for themselves
With low expectations of the authorities, Belarusians were bracing themselves for the worst.9

With the last of a handful of press briefings on the pandemic held on 24 April, information on safety protocols and the country’s situation has been scarce, inconsistent, and often contradictory. “It’s a personal decision for every citizen. If you want, you wear a mask. If you don’t want to, you don’t wear a mask—and this is a problem,” says Vitushka.

Citizens began practising self-isolation early on. On 26 March a crowdfunding campaign “ByCovid19” was launched in order to buy safety equipment for hospitals across the country. The movement collected around $360 000 (£277 000; €304 000) in three months and, with the help of nearly 1500 volunteers, they purchased and distributed around 450 000 pieces of personal protective equipment, oxygen tanks, and other medical equipment.

Although initially slow to react, the health ministry has worked alongside ByCovid19 and taken measures to reorganise hospitals and encourage social distancing, says Vitushka.

Another factor is that Belarus has very few care homes (203 beds per 100 000 of the population compared with 854 in the UK), with most elderly citizens living separately.10 This has helped shield its most vulnerable. “In many cases in Belarus, you have already had some isolation of elderly people, particularly in the countryside or in single flats” says Nilsson.

Nilsson says Belarus also benefited from being a relatively isolated country where the government can easily shut down borders and monitor those passing through. “People tend to go in the other direction,” he says, “Very few people will go to Belarus for holidays or work.”

Not out of the woods
With anti-government demonstrations ongoing in Minsk and other big cities following a controversial 9 August election that awarded Lukashenko another term, Belarus will likely see a sudden spike in infections. Nilsson believes this will serve as another pretext to crack down on government critics.

Lukashenko has allegedly overcome coronavirus infection, Nilsson says, framing it as yet another chapter in Belarus’s historical sufferings that the country managed to overcome. “This is Lukashenko 101, and he is probably not going to change.”

Although the low death numbers are encouraging, some experts fear that many coronavirus related deaths are registered as cases of pneumonia—UN data show a difference of 5605 between April-June 2019 compared with the same period in 2020.11 And the deaths per capita ratio remains one of the highest in Europe. Nilson is cautious, “Until we have the figures for excess deaths, I don’t want to praise Belarus too much.”

You can’t trust numbers coming out of Belarus. I’d have a lot more confidence in UK numbers. I’d trust China before I’d trust Belarus. If you believe WTF’s article Belarus did a good job of testing and isolation of sick individuals. And finally their death rate though lower than the UK is much, much higher than the East Asian and southeast Asian countries

So comparing a country with the approximate number of people as the city of London is somehow supposed to mean something. Dumb dumb dumb.

Population density matters in a disease that is passed by people breathing near one another. Originally Posted by 1blackman1

1b1- patronizing and insulting those not of the Groupthink/Doublespeak ideology - gains no respect for 'cogent and constructive" debate.
Such posts only display the weakness of inability to post reasonably, and the sense of superiority and entitlement ingrained in the devotees of the Ruling Class DPST/ccp party.

So my wife works in a office of less than 50 people.

3 people called in sick with Covid. Everyone in the office had to stay home until they got a clean COVID test. Paid several thousands of dollars to have cleaners come in and disenfect. About 6 days later the 3 people who were sick (and they work and eat together) come in with clean COVID tests. They claim "false positives" and never show their original COVID positive tests.

In the following weeks, 2 of those "false positive" people quit.

I'm sure this is happening all over the country.

Talked to a lady yesterday who said she won $10K on a scratcher and had to wait a month and a half to collect where winnings. Went to the Houston Office with an appt and she was the only winner there. 8 state employees just sitting on their butts.

There's 9 Million people in Belarus. There's at least that many people in London where they're stacked on top of each other like NYC.

Being a bit of a dictatorship, I wouldn't trust Belarus' numbers much, though I want to be sympathetic because in a lot of ways they're pretty based.

However, much like Belarus, both the hospitals and the media are state-owned in the UK, so I don't really trust them either.

Maybe the OP needs to move to Belarus

Main difference is that Belarus is predominately Communist/Marxist. I suppose Dilbert has flipped.

Ya'll are missing the point

Then please state the point concisely

'r/- read post number 2
alternative- form an 'explain it to me in terms i can understand" club - in reality a dodge to force others to do One's research for them.
SR will join.

Nope. Just a respectful request to condense. Usually such posts are a waste of bandwidth, but who knows? See previous posts about how to debate effectively...