Day 108

01/07/2020 Wednesday, Cloudy

It's the 1st day of the H2.

Italian whole-town study finds 40% of coronavirus cases had no symptoms

Vò, which has a population of nearly 3,200, was immediately put into quarantine for 14 days after suffering Italy’s first COVID-19 death, on Feb. 21.

During that fortnight, researchers tested most of the population for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

A analysis of the results, published in the journal Nature on Monday, showed that at the start of quarantine, 2.6% of Vo’s population - or 73 people - were positive. After two weeks, only 29 people were positive.

At both times, around 40% of positive cases showed no symptoms. But because all of the coronavirus cases found - whether symptomatic or not - were quarantined, the researchers said, this helped slow the spread of the disease, effectively suppressing it in a few weeks.

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Testing everyone could be costly and time-consuming. Some study suggest that monitoring the virus level in sewage water could be an effective way of telling the degree of spreading.

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Sweden starts critical look at its pandemic response

More than 5,300 Swedes have died compared to around 250 in Norway, 600 in Denmark and 325 in Finland, all of which have populations around half the size.

Sweden’s response to the virus outbreak, which has relied mainly on voluntary measures and common sense hygiene rules, has led to its being snubbed by its neighbours and other countries in Europe that have kept their borders shut to Swedish tourists.

Its toll is still lower than in some European countries, such as Britain, which has one of the worst death rates in the world.

Criticism in Sweden has focused mainly on the death toll among elderly residents of care homes, who make up the majority of deaths from the virus, and the late start to widespread testing.

<<I guess one of the reasons why Sweden has lower death rate than Britain is because the wealth distribution is less polarised. Many people in Britain can't afford to perform proper social distancing.>>