The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)

[dubsartur]

I am thinking too, there is coronavirus in Innsbruck again (19 cases plus another 20 in the rest of Tirol as of Tuesday!) but I may have to leave Europe briefly in the fall while i wait for the paperwork for my next job to finish.  I should use my time in Europe despite the virus and the wet weather.  And there are castles nearby which I have not seen!  Real live castles with towers and paintings and murder holes and kitchens!

The local tabloid is printing front-page stories about popular demands to require masks in the supermarkets again, and the Austrian national railways will start fining people for not wearing their masks on trains.  I started to see a few people wearing masks again in streets and shops this week aside from the usual few coming to and from work or using public transit.

[Jubal]

The Austrian govt were due to make a decision on responses to recent cases but haven't done yet because Kurz has been at the European Corona summit - a decision may be reached tomorrow. The likely thing seems to be a reimposition of masks in shops and possibly some other closed spaces. The rise in cases seems to mostly be in identifiable clusters, almost all of which are either food processing plants or churches. It's also planed off somewhat and the national numbers have bumped up and down in recent days rather than continuing to rise, but 1300 cases nationally feels a lot worse than the less than half of that we'd gotten down to before the Upper Austria spike.

Meanwhile at a European level it looks like progress is finally being made on a proper bailout package, with 390bn or so in grants more or less agreed upon after a fractious disagreement with four main factions - France & Germany just wanted a deal done, Spain & Italy wanted to maximise grants, Austria, Scandinavia and the Netherlands wanted to minimise grants and add conditions, and Hungary and Poland are still threatening to veto the whole thing if the conditions include requiring them to row back on their path to pseudo-dictatorship status.

[dubsartur]

Austria now has 6,665 active cases (749 per million population).  54% of them live in Wien-Land, where 29% of the population live.

[DeepCandle Games]

I feel like the border and travel policies within the provinces of the European Unions empire have large and perhaps exponentially contributed to the growth of cases in already effected areas as I feel is far more critical, the contamination of otherwise fairly isolated or inaccessible sections of europe; Places that would require some serious to reach otherwise

I'm not a big fan of the EU Imperium but this post isn't about that so I'll try not to ramble 

But I feel like this whole ordeal would have been better avoided if smaller municipalities had the will and jurisdiction to impose more severe measures independently of the sanction of their client sovereignty; One example would be if a municipalities council-persons were authorized to invoke emergency measures before receiving the order to or requiring to consult with their state governors

While financially they would still need to requisition funding I feel principally that state governments are shifting (atleast in the Australian region) into a roll of redundant intermediary political offices; lacking the ability or ambition to apply legislation or regulations as much as smaller bureaucracy while tying up much of the funding that would otherwise find its way into these projects

[Jubal]

I feel like the border and travel policies within the provinces of the European Unions empire have large and perhaps exponentially contributed to the growth of cases in already effected areas as I feel is far more critical, the contamination of otherwise fairly isolated or inaccessible sections of europe; Places that would require some serious to reach otherwise

As someone who lives right in the heart of the open-border area, this really isn't the case. Individual states mostly actually shut borders quite rapidly at the height of the crisis: and countries in the Union that do have borders and nominal border checks really haven't fared any better than those without. I guess another way to put it is that unlike what people tend to think, Schengen doesn't make that big a difference to how fast you can enter a country: like, you save a couple of hours in passport queues, but it's not like if I wanted to enter say the US under normal conditions that I'd actually take ages to do it. The EU's free movement rules are more about having the right to live and work and get healthcare in the countries you go to (and the latter is actually pretty useful in a pandemic because it cuts down bureaucracy when treating foreign patients). The EU overalll hasn't been a massive player in COVID, generally healthcare is treated as a national not an EU level problem: the main role of the EU has been helping to negotiate cross-border financial packages to help support states that have been especially hard hit like Italy.

I'd also strongly dispute the idea that the EU is an Empire - I feel like people from the Anglo countries often have and spread lots of weird ideas about how it works. As someone who lives in the middle of it, I'm not uncritical of it, but "Empire" gives a very wrong idea of what the actual problems are. But as you say, that's for a different thread

I do with a couple of caveats agree that there were places where we needed sharper localised responses much sooner (I guess generally politically I'm in favour both of devolving some powers to local level and having some at supranational, and reducing what I think of as the really oversize role of national governments). It's also true in much of Europe that the state-level administrations lack financial and executive power that could be useful at these sorts of times, and that isn't ideal when response planning, I absolutely agree - some additional powers devolved downwards from the national government level could help. In the UK it's getting to the stage where the Conservatives are trying to rewrite local government to have fewer elected officials because running for it is sufficiently pointless (and doesn't pay the bills) so that they struggle to find candidates even in their stronghold areas.

My main caveat to more localism in responses is that if a locality screws it up then it's bad for everyone: so that there needs to be a check on local administrations messing it up. The Austrian COVID outbreak largely initially started at winter sports resorts in the Tyrol, and basically the response to that from local officials was really slow and to assume it would just be a few isolated cases, partly because winter sports is where much of Tyrol's employment comes from and they didn't want to start harsh measures as a result. So state and local government can have its own sets of incentives with all this which aren't ideal either, and may be in some cases more vulnerable to getting it wrong because they don't have the political clout, higher level scientific advice, strategic planning capacity, etc that's more available to national governments.

[DeepCandle Games]

It's good to learn more detail about it, and also a relief that Europeans have been having some silver-linings during this time; It's easy for that idea to lodge itself in my head that things are much worse than they really are

[Jubal]

Yeah, the European response has varied a lot by country but other than Italy and Spain (which have quite gregarious elderly populations and got unlucky with getting hit early) and the UK (which totally screwed up its response) I think the general feeling here is something like "this is horrible but hey, look at the US, it could be a lot worse".

[dubsartur]

Yes, I think a lot of governments are thankful that they can let people point to some of the largest countries in the world and say "at least its not as bad as there."  I don't know if the countries which make the biggest mistakes are going to learn from them, but their neighbours might feel less need to defer to them. 

Germany has declared Austria a coronavirus danger zone.

[dubsartur]

You may be confused why some governments are still talking about 1.8 metre or 2 metre social distancing and handwashing and discouraging open-air gatherings given that we learned in spring and summer 2020 that the virus mainly spreads by aerosols not large droplets or touch.  Large droplets fall to the ground after a short distance but are more resistant to UV light than fine particles.  Wired has a summary of the research history which is also published as a paper.

[dubsartur]

One of the death cultists got to The Economist and wrote an anonymous piece framed as "New Zealand and Australia can't hide from the world forever" rather than "NZ and Australia, among other countries, destroyed this controllable disease, which continues to ravage many other rich countries whose officials chose to live with it"

[Jubal]

Numbers are starting to tick upwards again here in Austria, it may be a rough winter.

I had my fourth vaccination yesterday, which I'm fairly glad about.