Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country • Hacker News Board

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#131

Post by Melting_Harps » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:07 PM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #121

Melting_Harps wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In which way would be Italy incentivizing births? Its literately the first line in the link: >> It’s been almost two years since Prime Minister Matteo Renzi introduced an €80-a-month ‘baby bonus' for low-and-medium income families. >>> But now Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin wants to double that amount in a bid to stave off what she describes as a “catastrophic” decline in the country’s birth rate, as well as int…

Eur 80 / month is terribly low. I can pay a single day of babysitting with that money. But I don't receive it, it's for lower income families only. The sad truth is that Italy is hard for young people with the wrong degree (or without a degree). Postponing children is often a necessity, if you don't want to depend on your parents (who often own an house and have a nice pension). And so many skilled people just leave.

> The sad truth is that Italy is hard for young people with the wrong degree (or without a degree). Postponing children is often a necessity, if you don't want to depend on your parents (who often own an house and have a nice pension). And so many skilled people just leave.

That's pretty much the millennial plight, and I agree; the sum is absurd when put in proper context, but that is what the Italian Government deems 'necessary' to pay just to keep the native population (targeted low income and likely low educated) churning out more numbers. Apparently the secretary general wanted to double that, and 2-3x it for subsequent children.

The US probably subsidizes it even more with all the tax credits for having children, too.

I'm not saying this to be supportive of the process, just restating my observations. Also, Italy has the easiest immigration laws of all of the EU to help boost its population numbers.

Speaking of depending on their parents, I met a girl in Croatia visiting her Italian BF (she was from Washington) as she was thinking about staying long-term and living 'la dolce vita' a bit longer at her to be in-laws place when she realized all she had to do was marry her BF and would be granted complete citizenship.

They thought about taking a year to just travel if they did it, I wonder if she went along with it?

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#132

Post by idiocratic » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:07 PM UTC

greggyb wrote: post #14

idiocratic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockdown in Italy is a concept that is difficult to enforce. And it's probably very different to what it means in China or even just South Korea or any other more organised and centrally governed country in Europe like France. But in essence: Schools are closed until next month. People can still move around freely for work reasons, and in general people still work in offices. Bars and restaurants close after 18pm. Sh…

Completely random and off-topic. I'm in the US and used to 12-hour time. I personally prefer 24-hour time, and am comfortable with 18:00 or similar for a time indicator. I don't know that I've ever seen a 24-hour time with am/pm attached to it. Is this common?

You're right. My mistake.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#133

Post by zachguo » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

humaniania wrote: post #110

zjaffee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to look at the press release from this nursing home this morning, and the numbers are far worse than this. The number is much higher than that, as there are an additional 12 deaths that haven't been tested for coronavirus yet. 26 have died in the last three weeks as compared to 7 in a typical month. Another 26 are in the hospital, with the rest being quarantined at the home. Over 1/3rd of the staff there i…

Do you have a source for those numbers?

"The deaths associated with the facility, according to Killian, amount to 26 between Feb. 19 and March 7. That includes 15 patients who have died in local hospitals. Of those 15, 13 have positively tested for coronavirus."

https://www.bellevuereporter.com/news/life-care-center-of-ki...

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#134

Post by tunesmith » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

airstrike wrote: post #47

paganel wrote: post #21

Unreal, a month ago (February 7th) I was posting this news story [1] related to the city of Shenzen which was about to be put into some form of lockdown, it only received one upvote. A month from that event and we have an entire European country (a G7 member to add) under lockdown. I guess the normalcy bias [2] was too strong for too many people until reality hit us hard in the face. [1] https://www.epochtimes.com/gb…

I had a trip booked to Italy starting on March 20 so have been following the news very closely since at least mid February... I Ask HN'd how people were tracking the virus, and the answers I got were "I'm not tracking it in any way, shape or form and I hope it reciprocates the courtesy." Quite funny, but the stats don't lie[0]. The number of new cases in Italy has grown at an exponential rate. This is a developed eco…

You have to have number for each of:

(chance of contracting virus) * (chance of contracting disease from virus) * (chance of fatality from disease).

The first is dependent on containment efforts. The second is not 100%. The third is also partly dependent on containment efforts, as fatality goes up if hospitals get overwhelmed.

I don't see how you get "we're all going to get this" when China and South Korea are already reporting decreases in daily cases.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#135

Post by senordevnyc » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

igravious wrote: post #102

airstrike wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a trip booked to Italy starting on March 20 so have been following the news very closely since at least mid February... I Ask HN'd how people were tracking the virus, and the answers I got were "I'm not tracking it in any way, shape or form and I hope it reciprocates the courtesy." Quite funny, but the stats don't lie[0]. The number of new cases in Italy has grown at an exponential rate. This is a developed eco…

People keep extrapolating that tens of millions will die, and I don't doubt that tens of millions surely would _if_ there were no lock-downs! (The subject of this article!) The whole point of locking down Wuhan/Hubei and then northern Italy and now the whole country and other places and cancelling large public gatherings and events is that local, regional, and national authorities start seeing the numbers soaring and…

This is impossible to contain. The purpose of the lockdown isn't to contain, it's just to spread out the infections over a larger period of time so that hospitals don't get overwhelmed. But there's likely not a plausible scenario at this point where we globally jump on this and only a few million or even tens of millions are infected. All we can do is slow it down.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#136

Post by kspacewalk2 » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #107

paganel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope (and suspect) that the ECB (and Europe as a whole) will financially stand behind Italy, no questions asked (I'm a fellow European).

You seem to forget that the ECB is there for the banks, not for the people or their countries.

You seem to forget that [ insert deeply ideological sloganeering / extremely arguable value judgment ].

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#137

Post by adventured » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

igravious wrote: post #102

airstrike wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a trip booked to Italy starting on March 20 so have been following the news very closely since at least mid February... I Ask HN'd how people were tracking the virus, and the answers I got were "I'm not tracking it in any way, shape or form and I hope it reciprocates the courtesy." Quite funny, but the stats don't lie[0]. The number of new cases in Italy has grown at an exponential rate. This is a developed eco…

People keep extrapolating that tens of millions will die, and I don't doubt that tens of millions surely would _if_ there were no lock-downs! (The subject of this article!) The whole point of locking down Wuhan/Hubei and then northern Italy and now the whole country and other places and cancelling large public gatherings and events is that local, regional, and national authorities start seeing the numbers soaring and…

There is cause for optimism in the numbers out of South Korea and China. Even assuming China has lied about their numbers (population ratios with Italy and South Korea vs China make that plainly clear, they lied to a large degree on the numbers), if China has managed to bring it under control through their extreme quarantine measures, then we can prevent it from killing tens of millions. South Korea seems to have considerably slowed it there. Japan has done a good job of limiting its spread.

China has 1.4 billion people, and they've had ~3,000 deaths (let's assume it's several times higher in reality). But we'll see tens of millions dead globally? No we will not. If you killed every person that has been infected in China, and extrapolated that event globally, we would not see tens of millions dead. So that premise is absurd, to an extreme.

I consider this to be a very serious situation, however, it's not very serious as a great mass mortality threat (unless it mutates and becomes far more deadly and we prove unable to slow it down or vaccinate against it). It's a serious threat for massive disruption to our daily lives, including severely harming the global economy. It's a serious threat to swamping our healthcare systems due to ICU demands and diverting our resources to managing the ongoing crisis (instead of routine, normal productive work).

Assuming this isn't going to burn out come Spring & Summer, the next step is to rush to vaccine, at any cost. That will end this thing globally. Maybe we'll need to vaccinate against it annually, maybe it won't come back after this year, who knows of course.

Tens of millions will not die. Tens of thousands might die in the plausible worst case scenario, before we get a vaccine ready. We can rush to vaccine at greater patient risk and financial cost, as necessary.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#138

Post by int_19h » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:20 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #89

airstrike wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a trip booked to Italy starting on March 20 so have been following the news very closely since at least mid February... I Ask HN'd how people were tracking the virus, and the answers I got were "I'm not tracking it in any way, shape or form and I hope it reciprocates the courtesy." Quite funny, but the stats don't lie[0]. The number of new cases in Italy has grown at an exponential rate. This is a developed eco…

The range of mortality I see is rather 0.3-1% [1] [2] [1] https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1236321986122375168 [2] https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1235956761015783427 Not a doctor, but I suspect 3.4% is the upper end of the case fatality ratio (i.e. death among people tested positive) as opposed to the infection fatility ratio (i.e. death among estimate of people infected).

The range varies a lot depending on the quality of the treatment. The early initial estimates were based on data from Wuhan, where hospitals were overwhelmed early. The later, lower numbers were from areas where all new cases had hospital beds and ICUs available if they needed them.

Problem is, given the current numbers, the projected total number of people who will require hospitalization, and of those that will require ICU, significantly exceed availability. So if it spreads too fast, and all these people get sick at the same time, we won't have enough beds to go around - and that will cause the mortality rate to spike again.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#139

Post by gambiting » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

dsiegel2275 wrote: post #129

pmontra wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut feeling from Italy: May, difficult. June, maybe. But expect that this disease expands to almost everywhere so what's going to be the status of your country by then, regardless where you are from? I'm not expecting to be able to travel much this summer, not because I'm from Italy but because every country is going to have its own share of problems.

Thoughts on the UK? I'm supposed to go on a vacation to England for a week starting April 1st

You might as well roll some dice at this point - going to be as reliable for advice.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#140

Post by jpster » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 11:25 PM UTC

igravious wrote: post #102

airstrike wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a trip booked to Italy starting on March 20 so have been following the news very closely since at least mid February... I Ask HN'd how people were tracking the virus, and the answers I got were "I'm not tracking it in any way, shape or form and I hope it reciprocates the courtesy." Quite funny, but the stats don't lie[0]. The number of new cases in Italy has grown at an exponential rate. This is a developed eco…

People keep extrapolating that tens of millions will die, and I don't doubt that tens of millions surely would _if_ there were no lock-downs! (The subject of this article!) The whole point of locking down Wuhan/Hubei and then northern Italy and now the whole country and other places and cancelling large public gatherings and events is that local, regional, and national authorities start seeing the numbers soaring and…

I’m not sure about the overall efficacy of lockdowns unless:

- The US plays along. We are likely a hotspot now, whether we go the “undertest and live in ignorance” route, or not.

- We have an effective plan for rebooting out of the lockdown. Which, until we have an effective treatment or vaccine, to me means temperature scanning in most public places imaginable, continued vigilance around disinfecting, continued limits on public gatherings, and more.