341–350 of 915 posts
The Italian Department of Civil Protection is now publishing detailed confirmed case statistics on GitHub. I just finished throwing together a little animated map of of how it's been spreading across provinces: https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/italy-coronavirus-daily-...
Super interesting. For once it doesn’t look like a population density map.
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People in the UK have already been panic buying, mostly pasta and toilet roll AFAICT
The toilet roll thing seems to be everywhere (Germany is full of "why toilet paper!" outrage as well), but do people really panic buy so much? Toilet paper is an item you buy once every few weeks or months, depending on household size, it's very high volume per unit of money so shops stock just enough to satisfy an even random distribution of individual buying times. Now if all of a sudden, triggered by news, a consi…
I think you're right for the most part, but in Australia there have been videos/pictures of people overloading shopping carts with enough toilet paper to last a family for years. These people are out there but it's hard to tell if they're in significant numbers or just a few idiots. I think we needed a little bit of panic a lot sooner to smooth over these bumps, but most people did not heed the advanced warning that China gave us.
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Please note that Lombardy has a very very good health service. The OECD put a score on this [1]: 9.9/10. This is in the top 5% across all regions. Other european regions seem to have lower average scores and their governments are not taking serious actions. [2] How the US is reacting from my perspective (italian confined near Rome) seems borderline madness. Something about this situation confuses me a lot. [1] https:…
Politicians have no understanding of exponential growth. They look at low numbers and think "we have a lot of time" then are surprised later when they in fact don't.
This is an account from one of the doctors in Italy. https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753... Read the whole thing, but this passage in particular is just chilling. "5/ Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are start…
Please note that Lombardy has a very very good health service. The OECD put a score on this [1]: 9.9/10. This is in the top 5% across all regions. Other european regions seem to have lower average scores and their governments are not taking serious actions. [2] How the US is reacting from my perspective (italian confined near Rome) seems borderline madness. Something about this situation confuses me a lot. [1] https:…
This is an account from one of the doctors in Italy. https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753... Read the whole thing, but this passage in particular is just chilling. "5/ Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are start…
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I have been reviewing the situation with a colleague of mine, and we have now realized that the new measures are not enough. It makes no sense to allow burger king or any bar to stay open util 6 p.m. And it makes no sense to allow to go to work for any undeferrable (or also deferrable) reason. The only effective measure seems logically to be quarantine, and for me and my family (2+2), from tomorrow afternoon quaranti…
The problem with this is that a 14 day total economic halt will be devastating. Even assuming all office workers work remote basic social structure will be endangered. The hospitals need to stay open, people need to keep operating water and electricity utilities, food distribution needs to continue as many do not have 14 days of stock at home. It is not about those dams politician that only care about reelection numb…
"According to the official Weibo news of the "News 1 + 1" column of CCTV, on March 6, Bai Yansong talked with Wu Hao, the head of the community prevention and control expert group of the central steering group.
"Wu Hao said: Patients discharged from Wuhan must have 14 days of centralized isolation observation and 14 days of home medical isolation observation, and they must go through a total of 28 days of isolation observation period. The first 14 days are the observations of centralized medical isolation points, which are usually requisitioned and modified medical isolation points such as hotels or training schools for observation. In principle, each isolation point is matched by a doctor and a nurse for every 50 people, and there are other life support personnel. At the same time, there is a division-level leader cadre at the isolation point."[1][2]
Also, when it comes to trying to squash the epidemic nation-wide, even 28 days might not be enough, as you have to reset the clock with every new infection.
Let me give an example. Let's say everyone in Italy isolates themselves (with their families or whoever they're living with) for 14 days. At day 13, someone of them that's infected could infect someone else they're living with, and if they then go out in to society on day 14 they can start the epidemic all over again.
Of course, if this was perfect isolation, with every single individual keeping completely away from every other individual, then 14 days (or 28 days) might be enough (assuming no atypical cases that take longer to resolve). But that's not going to happen in the real world.
People will need to have some contact for getting food from each other, for example, and for keeping essential utilities like water and electricity running, for keeping hospitals open, etc. That's not to mention group living facilities like nursing homes and prisons. There are just not enough individual living accommodations to make perfect isolation possible.
Worse, even if there was perfect isolation in Italy, when the isolation period ends the epidemic could still start all over again when one single sick person from another country enters.
In order to be really effective, such isolation measures would have to be both perfect and simultaneously held all over the world, or else once a country is clear of the disease it would have to somehow prevent sick people from other countries from entering, which isn't going to happen either.
[1] - http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2020/03/06/700265.html
[2] - https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/feql65/wuhan_i...
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Politicians have no understanding of exponential growth. They look at low numbers and think "we have a lot of time" then are surprised later when they in fact don't.
The other thing is the incubation period is around 5 days. So really the numbers are at least 5 days behind.
It seems like these actions taken by governments will ultimately be futile, so the question is: can a vaccine or effective antiviral be developed fast enough to be worth the ~2-4 months of "slow spread" that can be bought in exchange for the economic and social slowdowns a country will sustain by creating massive quarantines like this? While an authoritarian government may be better suited to positively addressing so…
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That account has TEN tweets spanning 2013 - 2020. Then this thread. Don’t believe everything you read even if it sounds like a believable novel
This is an idiotic comment. The thread is a literal translation of this article written by the MD telling the story: https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-citta/con-le-nos... this is an online profile for the doctor: https://www.dottori.it/daniele-macchini-516895 The post was originally shared on Facebook.