I feel like there are some particular cultural attributes in the United States that make this useless at this point.
The United States has a very individualistic attitude. Sure, we can pause travel from Europe, but the current administration is very anti-europe. Can we pause travel in the US? I strongly doubt that we can effectively given the strong anti-expertise attitudes as well.
My guess is that the United States will become a more major hot spot for the virus than other locales. It will spread rapidly and the supply hoarding and sad state of our medical system will mean that in a few months, other nations will be rejecting flights from the US.
It's a prediction, a guess, but there are aspects of our culture that just makes it seem very likely. I'm not going to make any more predictions than the idea that we'll have more cases per capita than any other developed nation.
It's be interesting when I'm proven incorrect over time.
On the other hand, Americans have much larger and more comfortable homes than Europeans. Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies, which means less trips to the store. Very few people use public transportation regularly. Most people have private back yards. Many more meals are take-out or drive-thru. More Americans use e-commerce for shopping than Europeans.
In Europe by contrast, much more of life revolves around public spaces, like the park, cafes, the city square, and public transport. Americans tend to spend little time in restaurants, whereas Europeans relax and enjoy the meal, thus increasing their exposure time.
Think of the areas in the US that seen the worst outbreaks. Seattle, the Bay Area, New York, Boston. These are the metros, where the average resident is least likely to live a typical middle-American lifestyle. San Francisco in many ways is closer to Copenhagen than it is to Jacksonville.
Overall, social distancing is probably easier for Americans because our way of life already involves a good deal of social distance to begin with.
It sounds like you've never been outside of a city in Europe and never been to a city in the US? Urban population in the EU in 2018 is 76% while 82% for the same year in the US according to The World Bank.
Lived in Sweden for the last 15 years. Yeah, people out of cities have big back yards (people in cities have none), most workers eat out every day for lunch, shopping online (except for food) is pretty much the default. Denmark's pretty much the same.
I've lived in both, and you're missing how large the difference is. Not to mention you seem to be missing the point.
What the OP was saying is that americans don't eat out that much, is a very heavily home-oriented society - thats why the OP mentioned take out and delivery - not going out for lunch.
And yes people out of cities in nearly all countries have big backyards, but you are missing the people have big back yards in the US EVEN inside city limits. There are ofcourse the couple exceptions like NYC etc. but mostly even big cities have the weird suburban style houses even in the most expensive areas!
Guys, you are missing the point - these stereotypes, however true they might have been (or not), are over currently for Europe. Restaurants are empty or closed, people limit their social interaction and overall exposure to minimum. It doesn't matter much if we speak about Sweden or Italy or anything in between.
What will happen or won't in US or Europe is not anymore dependent on these behaviors.
Not sure how the backyard argument is relevant anyway. It's not like that makes not spreading the disease that much easier. Public transport is certainly a risk. But I'm not even sure if e-commerce helps. Going to Walmart at 1am and using self checkout is probably much safer than receiving your delivery from someone who might be infected and visits several hundred homes a day.
Got a citation for those numbers? Another poster claims that the US suburb population alone is 175M, and that's roughly half the country right there. Add in the rural population (46M), and 82% urban seems not even remotely correct.
Urban population in Europe also includes suburbs. Yes, there's less sprawl but enough people in Europe living in urban settings have backyards and reasonably large houses.
> Overall, social distancing is probably easier for Americans because our way of life already involves a good deal of social distance to begin with.
While that's true, behavior trumps lifestyle I think. I had a dentist appointment scheduled for this morning in San Francisco. I called my dentist office and explained that my wife has some mild-flu symptoms and asked if we should reschedule. They said that's since I don't have symptoms myself it's not necessary to postpone the appointment. That may happen in Jacksonville too.
omg yes! The dentist's going to stick their face right in his! after having stuck their face right into a bunch of other patients! and then they'll stick their face into a few more patients! It sounds like the perfect breeding ground. Even if I wasn't sick, I'd want to cancel for that alone!
Yeah but they use protections like masks, gloves. I think it's reasonable to assume that a dentist's office likely know better than you about how to minimize the risk. They have motivation in not ruining their business by being a source of local outbreak.
>Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies, which means less trips to the store
This is FUD. That isn't where you risk getting sick. The countries with the most effective response to COVIR-19 doesn't even try to stop everyday shopping or movement in cars at all.
>In Europe by contrast, much more of life revolves around public spaces, like the park, cafes, the city square, and public transport.
You don't get sick by being in a park or city square with someone else. More FUD. Please do some reading on the appropriate measures and what actually constitutes a risk of infection.
From what I've read, China tries to get people to go grocery shopping only once per week. They are the only ones who appear to manage to get the infection rate from 1.3x down to 0.3x in the past days.
Americans all gather together in the same room 5 days a week to work. They also have less protections for paid sick days so you will have min wage mcdonalds workers coming in sick and coughing on your burgers.
- we have a better healthcare system than is US (better as in public and for everyone)
- we own the most cars per capita in the west and are second in the world, public transport wasn't a big factor in this pandemia here
- food is much more controlled and we have a tradition of home made, home grown food, that doesn't require to go to the supermarket
- things are closer so trips are shorter and you can shop at many non packed smaller shops
- we react better to panic and are not armed
- infection has spread in small cities in the country where houses are larger, they have more storage, don't use public transport and social distancing in theory was easier
Wait until all the coronavirus infected hourly workers, who can't get treated because of a lack of healthcare and who have to continue going to work so they can pay rent, infect everyone through the take-out food :)
I mean there was literally a guy on the post from yesterday talking about how we're all paranoid and he's going to enjoy "exploring Boston and eating out while the lines are short".
Yeah some people are going to take advantage of cheap flights and small crowds. The thinner crowds is the point though. it still achieves the objective of lowering the R value.
I bought an annual unlimited longhaul flight pass on AirAsia for ~$150 USD, still have to pay taxes and airport charges. One return flight home and it pays for itself. Will see how that turns out, but is very much bargain hunting time for the brave.
Also traffic is great now. One good thing to come out of this is that governments might see the huge infrastructure benefits from just a small increase in remote workers.
> Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies
No they don't. No one in NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, ... have big garages to stockpile supplies and most of the US lives in those big cities with apartments without garages.
In the suburbs they do but that's a minority of the population.
> About 46 million Americans live in the nation’s rural counties, 175 million in its suburbs and small metros and about 98 million in its urban core counties.
> As a group, the population in rural counties grew 3% since 2000, less than their 8% growth in the 1990s. Urban county population rose 13% since 2000 and the population in suburban and small metro counties went up 16%, growth rates somewhat higher than in the 1990s.
It's hidden in plain sight: you mention "Boston, San Fransisco, and Seattle" in the same breath as NYC, but numbers-wise those are all pretty small and you're leaving out not only their suburbs but also the LA, Chicago, DFW and Houston areas which all have considerable amounts of suburbs and single family living, and hold almost 40M people alone...
And hell, a decent portion of SF at least land-wise is covered in single-family homes and duplexes, many (most?) of which are decently spacious and have garages. Even in cities, Americans tend to have more space than equivalently-situated Europeans.
Common most of the houses in outer richmond, sunset, ingleside, ... have multiple in-law units and converted garages. The cost of living is too expensive in those cities.
How does a garage help? Many people living in urban areas in Europe have a basement. And even those who don't shouldn't have issues storing 2 weeks worth of food in their houses or apartments. Fridge space is probably the only restriction for that.
Majority of US population lives in the suburbs. Roughly 30% live in urban areas and many of them would have garages or basements. For example, my town is considered urban and all the houses have garages.
> No one in NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, ... have big garages to stockpile supplies
I think most of San Francisco by area is zoned "RH-" (Residential Housing), and most of that RH- area is RH-1 or RH-1D (single family). Most of the homes in those regions have lots of space.
We're not just talking about Zuck's mansion either, plenty of homes in the Sunset or other West SF areas that have that kind of room.
Friend of mine went on a walkabout. Camping in his van and decided to live off just what was in his food bin. Basically a short half full rubber maid container. Lasted him three weeks.
Only time will tell, but fairly aggressive measures are already being taken in California and Washington where the cases are only in the hundreds, and many other states are following close behind when they have few to no cases. One thing even many Americans don’t properly appreciate is the degree to which most things are actually run at the state and local level. So far the federal dysfunction has not stopped the states and cities from moving. If that stays the case, the US may be okay.
One other factor in the US favor, it’s extremely low population density compared to the rest of the world. The US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all similarly low density and in this specific case likely to benefit from that.
I'm not sure the average population density across the entire country is that relevant - it doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of population.
The US is actually rather an urban country - 82% live in urban areas which is more than Italy (75%):
You pretty much can't compare the definition of "city" or "urban area" in different countries, so that tells you nothing.
I mean, Berlin has 3.7 million people in a city of 890 sq km. Melbourne has about 5 million people in a city of almost 10,000 km. They're incomparable, and so the urban population of Australia and Germany are incomparable. (You can play with the definitions as much as you like but you'll never be able to compare arbitrary Australian and German cities.)
This is actually due to the inclusion of suburbs and exurbs in the “urban” category for US, Canada & Australia.
Half of the US population lives in the suburbs (see above posters). What we would recognize as a real urban environment only accounts for less than a third of the US population (98M people).
Maybe its my UK bias - the distinction between urban and suburban doesn't seem to feature a lot in statistics here - things are often just usually "urban" (including suburbs) or "rural".
I did see a figure of about 55% of everyone in England and Wales living in suburbs - but I suspect our suburbs look pretty dense to someone from Houston or indeed Achiltibuie!
Washington has just, for example, banned all events with over 250 people in them for the three most affected counties.
Cities and counties in CA had been doing the same with different thresholds. Which meant an NBA game was going to be played without fans (since then, the NBA season has been suspended, which is a pretty significant measure in and of itself).
Many schools have been closing in the Seattle area, and just today the Seattle school district, and many outlying school districts closed for at least two weeks. That's a lot of school closures.
Many companies are having employees work from home wherever possible. The amount of traffic in Seattle during rush-hour is an astronomical change. There's very light traffic during rush hour in places that used to be wall-to-wall vehicles.
As someone living in the Seattle area, it feels like life has substantially changed.
Bay Area, I'm wfh, my wife is wfh, all our family and friends that work for major tech companies are wfh, 85-N had no traffic at 9:30 AM this morning, we pulled our kid out of gymnastics class 2 weeks ago, we haven't been going to museums (one of which is closed, because of coronavirus), and his day care (which nominally has 12 students) was down to 7 last Friday and now 3 of those are out because of hand-foot-mouth disease. Berkeley, Stanford, and Santa Clara University have all gone remote-only and sent the students home. Stores are completely out of rice, beans, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, etc, and a bunch of people are wearing masks. I figure it's just a matter of time before we're on complete lock-down.
I have a few friends that teach at K-12 schools in California and they've all been told to figure out what platform they want to use to do teach remotely. Our local school district sent out an email to parents outlining an online teaching plan.
I don't know if they're all just being exceptionally prepared or if there's plans for a more widespread school shutdown here.
School districts are closing down, for one. For example, my hometown's school district (Elk Grove Unified School District) shut down all campuses this week (but are apparently allowing athletic and academic team activities - i.e. sports - tomorrow): http://www.egusd.net/covid-19/
Allow me to rephrase then: while the overall population density of the US is low, we have some pretty large dense areas, including Southern California and the northeast megalopolis
Compared to similar areas elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, these areas are not dense at all. Wuhan, which you surely hadn't heard of before this crisis, is ~denser than~ nearly as dense as New York City, for example.
Europe is a huge place and it's hard to pin it down to a single culture. The collectivism is mainly seen in northern Europe and Scandinavian countries. If you've ever been to Napoli or Sicily you wouldn't feel the same way. Feels more like Morocco sometimes.
Many parts are really not as collectivist as people seem to think. Not as collectivist as Asia at least, not even close. Individualistic tendencies are strong over there, although not as strong as in the US.
I would've thought that the closer personal contact in Southern Europe (hugging/kissing for greetings) would spread it faster. But if you look at infection rates, most more Northern countries now look pretty similar to how it spread in Italy 1-2 weeks ago. So not sure if culture actually plays a role.
I guess it's all down to the economy, business travel spread it a lot. that's why areas with strong economies seem to be affected more than others (at least in Spain, Italy and Germany). Banning travel could work quite effectively for that.
I said the strong parts of each country were most affected. Not saying economically strong countries more than weaker countries but stronger regions more than weaker regions.
For Italy it's the North, for Germany South & West, for Spain the regions around Barcelona & Madrid. In each case, they were hit hardest. I don't believe that this is coincidence. There are other factors, like wealth leading to more travel and general, as well as population density. But interconnection by economic activity looks to me like a major factor.
Just yesterday I listened to an interview with a medical expert, and the host asked him if he should cancel his domestic holiday plans. The host assured him that was premature.
And yet here we are the next day. The situation is evolving rapidly.
>The host assured him that was premature. And yet here we are the next day. The situation is evolving rapidly.
Meh.
Your personal risk to become infected via $generic_domestic_holidays is pretty low, but the risk to increase the overall threat-vector by allowing open flights from domestic zones is very high.
The personal assessment just differs from the supervising political assessment, while the observed/assessed situation is exactly the same. Also: be careful with "experts", whenever that label is used, you should be very wary. A "medical expert" doesn't inherently know anything about politics at scale, he just (simplification alert) knows which medication to apply when which symptoms arise.
Agreed, it’s amazing the range of guests Joe Rogan has on his show. Admittedly some are more witch doctors than actual doctors but his recent conversation with Michael Osterholm was the real deal.
Even India is pausing all travel from Europe for next one month. It's not about US/India, Europe got lot of exposed cases and currently it's the best way to prevent further spreading.
More or less doesn't matter. It's a classic case of "one person can ruin it for everyone", which is why in many countries there is strict enforcement rather than just recommendations.
It isn't a classic case of one person can ruin it for everyone. When I choose not to go to the bar, the guy at the bar that ignored the advice about not going out in public still doesn't infect me.
So less dramatically: individuals can (and will!) reduce their exposure to infected people that make poor choices.
Of course the more people that do the right thing the better, but it isn't a situation where the outcome is controlled just by the worst actors.
Unless you hermetically seal yourself from the outside world, you are still at risk. Yes that risk can be reduced, but as more and more people are affected, your own chances go up exponentially, no matter what measures you take.
The United States has a very individualistic attitude. Sure, we can pause travel from Europe, but the current administration is very anti-europe. Can we pause travel in the US? I strongly doubt that we can effectively given the strong anti-expertise attitudes as well.
My guess is that the United States will become a more major hot spot for the virus than other locales. It will spread rapidly and the supply hoarding and sad state of our medical system will mean that in a few months, other nations will be rejecting flights from the US.
It's a prediction, a guess, but there are aspects of our culture that just makes it seem very likely. I'm not going to make any more predictions than the idea that we'll have more cases per capita than any other developed nation.
It's be interesting when I'm proven incorrect over time.