Speaking of today's situation, that's straightforward. Fewer infections in the population in general, lower probability that an elder care worker in a given facility gets infected and goes to work contagious without their knowledge. Once that happens, game over.
This effect is evident just from different death rates per capita in countries that have similar demographic and housing situations, e.g. between the Scandinavian countries.
I'd expect that better working conditions would have been a much bigger help.
These workers would like to follow the general guidelines and stay home if they have any symptoms, but they generally work hours, not salary jobs, and can't miss too much work.
If they had the flexibility and leisure a lot of the swedish middle class experience at their office jobs, being able to call in sick, then more of the care workers could have obeyed the recommendation by the health authority.
But for now it's a low-wage, high pressure sector with less than ideal working conditions.
To add to that, the same patients meet very many different caregivers during a week due to the same working conditions, and this is also not good for preventing transmission.
I suspect that in the aftermath of this. There’s are the things that will have had the biggest impact on outcomes. The pre-conditions at the start. Not differences in response strategies.
But his point is that they are just experiencing these deaths now rather than in 2 or 6 months time, and that does seem likely given a vaccine is at least a year away.
