Yes, the data point is undisputed. We will see how this develops as apparently we do not know for a fact why this ratio is so improved.

Got it! I understand your viewpoint but let's agree that the WHO has more than changed/flip-flopped their position and then some. Now they say, as of today, lockdowns are not necessary as the lockdowns adversely affect the poor....

Hard to know what to think when the WHO keeps changing their position...

I think this has been a learning process for everyone, including the WHO. Health organizations and politicians have had to make some pretty tough calls throughout all of this. However, the WHO may have also changed their stance about lockdowns because the public now has access to masks (whereas that wasn't the case before), and hospitals are no longer facing a shortage of PPE and ventilators as they were last Spring. And as already mentioned, death rates have come down since then.

The WHO has a long history (much prior to Covid) of shaky opinion pieces based on questionable research and presented in a sensationalist manner. It has become part of the noise rather than an instrument for providing clarity and calm. Read them like you read fox news:double check

A lockdown definitely works, actually it can hardly fail to stop the spread of an infectious disease.

The problem is working out the balance between the gain in reduced infections vs the impact of the lockdown itself.

The WHO can give a medical opinion, e.g. based on the impact of isolation and poverty.

But only a government can decide the overall policy also taking into account economic and long term impact, which can also have negative health impacts. And in open democracies, they can only do that with some level of public support, as we're seeing in e.g. the UK where theoretical lockdowns are in practice not very effective because too many people break the rules.

At least in Switzerland we have a generally health conscious and public-minded population, who are adhering to relatively light restrictions fairly well.

That actually means that either the virus has weakened or people's bodies start to "mutate" in a manner of building strenth or they learnt more about how to actually treat the patients at the hospital or ..... what ever the reason, imo they should make use of this observation and find out what the reason is. This information per se is not very useful. Yet.

Not looking good for any herd immunity strategy...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...t-such-us-case

one case in 8 million people who have caught it. will always happen.

A statistically irrelevant case, but people tend to extract anything as long as it supports their outlook. We, as a species are just not used to dealing with large numbers, boring facts and are generally unable to think rationally under perceived stress, we prefer to hear stories as much as they might be irrelevant and even false. Reinfections are extremely rare - there have been only a few examples out of more than 37 million confirmed cases, but that won't stop the alarmists here to keep on bringing these few examples continuously. It's the life-blood of the thread!

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54512034

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the mutations were less dangerous, this information from someone working in a lab. Everybody here dissed my statement.

The main challenge for reaching herd immunity anytime soon will be the expected limited effectiveness of vaccines combined with the growing unwillingness of people to get vaccinated. And that is assuming a vaccine is widely available in the first place.

It would appear the population has come to their senses, realising that this is not as dangerous as made out.

First, that was not the point. The point was herd immunity and how far we are from it.

Second, everybody is free to get vaccinated or not. Covid, flu, whatever. Your implication that not getting vaccinated is evidence of people "coming to their senses" is mindboggling.

The Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine looks to be a good source of information:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/declin...f-german-data/

The causes might not be clear but the information is useful -fatality rates are falling, which should reduce anxiety about Covid, for which the general media is doing exactly the opposite and the media is also not helping with compliance of whatever measures governments are taking.

Swiss government determined to avoid repeat of Covid lockdown

Berset said on Monday that the overall aim of the strategy was to prevent a repeat of the three-month nationwide lockdown, which led to a near standstill of public life.

We can all imagine why they want to prevent another lockdown.

This was in The Economist not long ago. Interesting how allegedly people trust in science and doctors the more the higher GDP per capita is. For vaccines it is the other way around.

Interesting this doesn't agree with statistics for Switzerland here: https://lenews.ch/2019/06/20/switzer...accine-safety/

Only 22% say vaccines are unsafe, so 78% think they are safe. Unless there's a "don't know" option in the surveys, which is a bad idea if you want useful responses, but a good one if you want to spin the data either way.

Also 97% of people in Switzerland are vaccinated with the standard set, which is odd if only 50% think they're safe!

But then it's a balance - are vaccines 100% safe, of course not. Are they much safer than getting the disease, for the majority of people - of course, otherwise they wouldn't (shouldn't) be approved.

So if someone asked me "are vaccines completely safe" I would have to answer NO, but I'm definitely not a vaccine skeptic.

The Economist mentioned Wellcome Trust as one of the sources to the article, so underlying dataset may be the same. In any event, Switzerland seems to be quite skeptical to vaccine safety. I thought more so than the Swiss data point, the negative correlation to GDP was interesting.

Every vaccine you had, had been tested & used in the population for many years, probably decades. The worry is in a vaccine that has been tested for 100 days rushed into production where the rules have been changed. Apparently the manufactures have also been absolved of liability if anything goes wrong. Seems a very different scenario to the vaccines I had as a child.

These were the options to answer: