[Owen]

I grabbed only a handful of countries that suggested to me they should be much more vulnerable than they have proven to be. I could keep grabbing.

But overall it’s too obvious a question. CDC has to have staff obsessing over the question. And NHS in England.

I dismiss mitigation on Taiwan. Population density would overwhelm nearly anything that might be done.

Asia has overall been very lightly touched by the virus from day 1. Japan deaths/million are tiny. That’s another density issue. I don’t care if everyone is in a mask, when you have police pushing people to pack them into trains, you are going to get infections . . . but it just hasn’t happened.

[Paul R.]

What you are missing though, is that up until now, Taiwan never had enough cases (and does / did have very tight monitoring) to where virion levels, say, in a bunch of those trains, would get away from them. Sure, a few outbreaks occurred, but, they caught them and squelched them.

I suspect that in the case of moderately high infectivity and moderate population mobility, high population density may actually make tracking & containment easier.

Omicron may of course blow that up.

HERE, obviously we never had a chance at containment.

One thing is interesting though. At least prior to Omicron, high population density even in countries with poor tracking (etc.) has not been a consistently noteworthy COVID accelerant. Hmmm......