I'm from Brussels/Belgium
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Please note that:
*In August, our figures started rising slightly. Nobody gave a **** and was just very tired of the virus.
*At the same time some populist ****s became popular in the press saying that we were letting too much be determined by the virus, and that we should try to live with the virus, not stop our lives (sounds like the orange man doesn't it?).
*This resulted in the government announcing major easing of restrictions at the end of August (language of the government was actually: we used to tell you what you are allowed to do, now you are allowed to do everything except for the things we are about to say you can't do!).
*1st of September is back to school for many countries in Western Europe.
So we had the genius idea of doing all of this together 1st of September: (1) everyone back to school for the first time since March, (2) restrictions at their lowest point since March and (3) because schools were back open and the rules in place allowed it, the majority of employers also significantly increased the amount of required presence at the office to its hhighest point since March.
This resulted in a rapid increase in cases in the poorest parts of Belgium, where social isolation is harder because of worse living conditions, more prevalence of jobs that require social contact, more reliance on public transport,...
From there it spread to the rest of Belgium because Belgium is tiny and people generally live everywhere here, and travel everywhere easily in the country if you own a car. And governments took action way too slowly.
People have finally started panicking here a few days ago. A few weeks too late. The graphs are actually scary, you can see a lot of them here:
https://epistat.wiv-isp.be/covid/covid-19.html
People in ICU is currently at 632 and rising rapidly, vs a peak of 1285 in wave 1 (49%). Our capacity is close to 2k if we stop all non-urgent care and healthcare workers don't collapse, which is luckily still far off. We do have one of the highest number of ICU beds per capita vs rest of Europe, so some European peers might be less off.
Also wouldn't say we're the only epicenter in Europe right now.
Czechia statistics are still worse than Belgium, and regions in France, Spain and UK are very close to ours. There are cities in France & UK that have almost as many inhabitants as Belgium.
And we are also testing a ton more compared to the rest of Europe, we'll be passing USA & Russia in the next few days in total tests per capita.
The wave is in a phase in Europe where number of new cases is again not the most valuable metric. Testing strategies & capacities are vastly different across regions again. And countries are at positive rates varying between 10% and 35% again.
It's all about deaths & people in hospital again. I am certain Belgium is also in top 5 worst-off countries there, too, though. After not learning enough from wave 1
.