WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING IN BELGIUM?

If, like me, you keep the Worldometers page for covid-19 cases by country open in a tab pretty much all the time now, you may have noticed that, despite the fact that the USA gets all the press for stupid responses to Covid-19 and Spain and Italy get all the press for deaths, it is actually Belgium - land of frites, waffles, chocolate, beer and that statue of the little peeing kid that somehow became a travel destination - that has the most deaths from Covid-19 per capita. Yes, Belgium's current Covid-19 death rate is at 784 per million, which is higher than Spain (591), Italy (528), the UK (511) and actually everywhere except San Marino (1209), and San Marino doesn't count because it's just a tiny independent city-state landlocked within northern Italy, which is like a nexus of bad things to have happen to you right now.

And that high death rate isn't simply a result of testing more, either, given that you would expect "more tests" to correlate with "more Covid-19 deaths" simply because you can be more certain of who has Covid-19 when they die. Belgium is testing a lot (60,000ish per million people), but it's testing less with Spain, which as we noted has fewer Covid-19 deaths, and it's testing only somewhat more than Italy (around 50,000 per million). It also isn't the result of policy: Belgium actually has some of the strictest lockdown protocols in the industrialized world and instituted them relatively early. So, again: what the fuck is happening in Belgium?

The answer appears to be related to two factors: one statistical (about how we count Covid-19 deaths) and one real (how people are dying from Covid-19). The real factor is relatively straightforward: in Belgium, elderly people mostly live in nursing homes and retirement apartments, much moreso than in most countries, and as most people know by now, nursing homes and retirement apartments are where Covid-19 spreads most quickly and in most deadly fashion regardless of what country you're in. It didn't help matters especially that Belgium's policies with respect to nursing homes were insufficient with respect to personal protective equipment and general anti-transmission protocols in the first weeks of the pandemic.

But, again: lots of countries have had significant deaths in nursing homes. So it's not that, not entirely. And the answer then turns to statistics, and how Belgium counts Covid-19 deaths. And the answer is: Belgium's death number includes deaths in nursing homes suspected to be Covid-19, but not confirmed as such. (The example they give in explaining this is literally "look, if you have a couple of people die from Covid-19 in the first week, and then fifteen people die the next week in the same home, well, it's not exactly rocket science as to how they died.")

There's a lot of debate as to whether this has led to a possible overcount in deaths for Belgium, but Belgium's medical authorities generally believe their count is either accurate or possibly slightly lower than the actual number of Covid-19 deaths simply because every country is missing Covid-19 deaths in their count and if Belgium overcounts a few deaths in nursing homes that probably at best only cancels out the deaths they've missed. This theory isn't exactly confirmed, but the fact that Belgium's Covid-19 death count tracks much more closely to its excess mortality rate (IE, "how many more people are dying right now than on average at this time of year") than just about everywhere else makes the theory a lot more likely to be accurate.

So there's your answer. Belgium isn't some particularly terrible plague vector or grossly mismanaged public health system: they're mostly just counting deaths more intensely than other countries are. Given that almost every country has less confirmed Covid-19 deaths than its excess mortality and that we know pretty much every country is undercounting Covid-19 deaths, Belgium's death rate and its likely accuracy means that it probably doesn't have more people dying than elsewhere. Which is good news, because it gives us an idea of what the upper bound of Covid-19 mortality is when there's strict lockdown measures in place, and bad news because it's a lot of dead people.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movie watching still too great to sum up here and my Letterboxd page is behind on reviews (although I'm still logging everything). We're mostly recording swaths of movies off Turner Classic and watching them these days. That said, I will specifically suggest from a streaming perspective that Uncorked on Netflix is capably good.

We've started watching The Great, the Hulu dramedy about Catherine the Great's coup to eliminate Peter III that made her Tsarina of Russia. (It's on Amazon Prime in Canada.) It is wildly historically inaccurate, of course, for the sake of narrative, but it is also very entertaining: Elle Fanning is very good and Nicholas Hoult's Peter is an absolutely stellar villain. And it's really funny.

In vidyagames, currently playing Hades, Supergiant's most recent release, which is still in Early Access, where you pay less for the game because they haven't finished it yet. That said, it looks to be about 75-90% finished right now and it's a really fun roguelike beat-em-up/shooter combination with the usual giant array of variable player powers that Supergiant always puts in their games, and the expected excellent soundtrack and voice acting that Supergiant games always have, so if you're looking for a good diversion that can last forty minutes or so at a time, it's worth considering.

See you soon enough.