Does It Really Matter.....?

So how's that working for you?  That social distancing thing?

Different countries have been using different strategies to fight COVID-19.  And the folks at the University of Oxford have developed an index to track who is doing what.

It is called a Stringency Index and is based on seven indicators of stringency - all given equal weight: 

• school closings, 
• workplace closings, 
• cancellation of public events, 
• shutting down of public transport, 
• public information campaigns, 
• restrictions on internal movement, 
• and controls on international travel

Surprisingly, they did not include: people must dress as plague doctors.   See April 6th for more info on that.

Anyway, the higher the score, the more "locked down" or "woke" the country is.

[As always, click on any graph to zoom in.]

Some observations:

• Canada seems to be right in the middle of the pack.
• several hard hit European countries (red arrows) look to be quite locked down.
• the USA is near the bottom
• and Sweden, as an experiment, did not enact many or any restrictions.

So how is that working for everybody?  Can we tell by looking at infections or deaths in each country.  Glad you asked.

If being more stringent was helping, we could expect to see something like this.

Increasing "stringency" would result in fewer cases (per million population).  The green area is the sweet spot, less than the global average of per capita cases.

However, here is what the data actually shows.

No real trend.  In fact, the trend almost going in the wrong direction.

What about deaths per million population.

Nope.  The countries with the toughest measures seem to be faring the worst.

Now, the people who came up with this said it is a very rough measure.  It depends on when countries put these measures in place, were they well enforced, how accurate is country's the caseload reporting, etc. etc. 

So as far as I can see, the moral of the story is, smoke 'em if ya got 'em.