Probably wasted money on vaccine promotion. It didn't feel like a vaccine did much difference in such short time-frame and number of immune people rose super slow even towards the end.

When they extend the game till the end of 2021 and beyond vaccines may make huge sense.

The problem is this: if you assume an exponential decay, you're saying there's no point after infection at which the probability of transmission is zero. Probability of infection has a half-life in SIR. But for a virus like covid, we know that's not true: if you're infected, give it six weeks and you won't be infectious any more, one way or another. If you replace an exponential decay with a finite transmission lifetime, you do end up with different epidemic curves: they have steeper fall-off, for instance.

What's the reasoning here?

First, this URL https://covidgame.info/ loads the game in English by default. There was a plan to popularize the game outside of Czechia but, frankly, we missed the window when major news outlets were interested.

The game source code is here: https://github.com/swehq/corona-game

I added few comments on the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27763873#27766930

The only problem is that in hindsight of course we can do pretty well. I guess most governments could do better after the fact. Too bad you can't play the future with random-generated possibilities. The fact that we don't know what's going to happen would make it in part more accurate.

Afterwards there were a few more weekends with lower turnout and until about month or two ago there were free testing places all over the country. These were during many periods require to cross between regions, go to work or shops. Significant fraction of population was getting tested on weekly-biweekly basis.

I can't find a good chart because most only show PCR tests (for a good reason!) but according to [2] Slovakia averaged 7300 tests per 1000 people.

The initial mass testing weekend was useful to get an overview of distribution of the infections and remove a large chunk of the infected from the pool (despite high false negative rate of those tests). It was also good PR and made people more aware how serious the situation is and reconsider if they would rather wear the mask and distance than go through this.

However the continued testing is now viewed as mostly useless. More money spent or tracing and targeted PCR testing, plus vaccine campaigns could have helped more.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/01/half-slovakia-... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#how-many-test...

I know it was only few instances and the same relationship doesn't hold for other countries, and also most recent school opening in the summer didn't cause the next wave for the first time. But I think in Poland where we don't party all that much those little unhygienic buggers share way larger portion of the burden than science could establish so far.

Antigen tests are less sensitive, applicable in a much more narrow time frame than PCR tests, and not as trivial to perform correctly as suggested in the media. On top of that, they can be sensitive to external factors as well (such as temperature swings for tests in storage, and fast expiration).

I dislike these antigen tests due to the false sense of security they give people. They have their uses, but they are not a substitute for PCR tests.

There's a reason why influenza antigen tests are not widespread.