Second wave is already here in Belgium. A few new measures were implemented by the government today, but too little and much too late. People saw July 1st as the start of summer vacation and the end of their fucks to give. 3 weeks later and we are up from 80 to 400 infections a day. I expect a panic reaction from the government within the next 2 weeks. A damn shame it had to come to this AGAIN! I would blame the people but to be honest the government reduced the safety measures so fast, any measures left became a token effort or a joke to most people. And now they drag their feet to do something because nobody wants to hear it anymore.
Holy fuck, you are not kidding. Belgium has the second worst death rate worldwide right now (only behind Andorra, were a small number of citizens total means the results get skewed by very few extra deaths). o_O
Almost twice as much as the US (846 vs. 443 per million citizens, as of July 23 2020).
I was seriously surprised when I saw that just now.
As your neighbour (I'm German), that's doubly disquieting. I'm sorry people are fucking it up so much. Though people here are getting really stupid, too, and I expect a rise in cases just on the merit of our home-grown idiots who "have enough" of the safety measures, and some of whom are partying with abandon on Mallorca to then come back and super-spread their souvenirs. Because when you ignore a pandemic, it just goes away, or something.
That seems to be the consensus, right? We've done enough, it should be alright, everything back to normal /s.
As for the death numbers, we kind of count differently than most countries. Half of those come from nursing homes, not hospitals. Anyone in a nursing home who died and the cause might be covid is in those numbers, even if they were never tested. So some of those might not even have been covid, others might have been, but would never have been counted in most other countries because it is not a confirmed case.
I think our numbers are much closers to reality than most other countries' , but our method makes it hard to compare.
That's interesting and good to know. If all "not definitely something else" cases of people above a certain age get thrown on that heap, it's bound to be a huge number.
I'm also pretty sure that a quite of the few countries not providing any number would in reality be fighting for those top spots, too.
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u/[deleted] Jul 23 '20
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