Russia has had amazingly few reported cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus, even though most of the country’s land area is in Asia and it shares thousands of miles of border with China.
Here are few possible explanations in the CBC video below:
Russia closed the border with China very quickly
Patrols through Asian communities looking for people with symptoms of the disease
Holy water blessed by Orthodox priests
Two-week quarantine on visitors from China
Large numbers of cases might be not reported
Another possibility not listed: consumption of large amounts of vodka kills the virus.
As I noted in another thread, high humidity appears to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, which may explain the lack of community spread in tropical regions. On the other hand, Russia is much colder and drier than most locations in the US and western Europe where it has spread very quickly.
According to a Russian scientist, the current outbreak should be over by summer with appropriate government actions:
Are there factors that I missed?
What factors do you think have been most important?
Is there anything the US and Europe should learn from the apparent Russian success?
Or is it just that the Russians have been really good at hiding the true number of cases?
Or perhaps they actually have an effective system for testing and follow up with contacts of people who are infected:
“In addition, the quality of diagnosis has now increased significantly, and therefore the detection of the virus is quite high,” he added. “In general, measures taken against the spread are adequate, although sometimes excessive.”–Dr. Shestopalov from RT link
China did, for a long time, enabling travelers to enter (and pick it up and take it home) and citizens to leave (taking their Chinese export with them) before anything started getting announced.
They don’t mess around and stopped travel from China immediately he doesn’t have to worry about being called a racist by half of the country for doing this, China is now banning travel to their country from Europe the Chinese government will not be called racist for doing it.
From what I see Europe’s response to the coronavirus has been paralyzed by three fears:
fear of panic
fear of being labeled xenophobic
fear of being labeled racist
Europe continued to welcome tourists from eastern Asia, even as Asian countries instituted travel bans and lockdowns. The EU policy of freedom of movement means that the initial outbreak in Italy now affects all the member countries.
The Russian government has not been paralyzed by these fears.
