Something is very wrong in Belgium. It’s known that Belgium reacted a bit slow to the Covid-19 pandemic, and only entered lock down on March 18th, after 18 people had already died and the number of infected exceeded 1000 people. Nevertheless, 29 days have passed, and things seemed not to have worked, as the following chart depicts:
After the initial lockdown, everything seemed to work inline with other countries such as France, UK or the Netherlands. Not that those countries fared extremely well, but were not at the levels of Italy or Spain.
Then, around April 9th ( or around March 21st, the date 20 days earlier) something went very wrong. The number of fatalities started to skyrocket. And has continued ever since. From 15 fatalities per 100 000 to 42 fatalities, exceeding those of Italy or Spain, and becoming the world’s most affected country by Covid-19, and the curve is nowhere near becoming flat.
This demonstrates that announcing a lockdown is different that enforcing a lockdown.
Let’s compare Google’s data from Belgium with other (now) less affected countries, such as Spain.
| Spain | Belgium |
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So, Spain’s lockdown was more strictly implemented than Belgium’s, and not that the figures from Spain are anything to praise, it does demonstrate that how strict you enforce the lockdown, the better your results can be.