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Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

bbc.com

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

#571

Post by winrid »

soneil wrote: post #226
CaciaraAsAServi wrote: post #65

I was not very surprised that Italy turned out to be the (first?) major hit in Europe. Considering the strong business connections, it had to be either us or Germany. We are, as much of the world, importers from China, but many enterprises here are also, somewhat, strong exporters to China (I can see it from my dayjob as industrial automation SI), and if you factor in the small average size of Italian companies requi…

> Another interesting thing I have just noticed is that some journalists are now openly praising the Chinese handling of the crisis. I think this is a very interesting effect. China has a fantastic ability to mobilize as one when needed. The vast majority of the time, the insane amount of control this requires, is something we're simply not comfortable with giving to governments. But sometimes, just sometimes, the re…

"What makes China feel alien to us is that this is their default stance" - Very well said!

I relate to this a lot based on my visit there. Things seem very unified. Hell, even dozens of old people get together every night and dance on the street. When have you ever seen communities like that in the US? We're too busy being self absorbed. We have no shared mission.

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

#572

Post by zwirbl »

dorkwood wrote: post #497
ALittleLight wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am extremely disappointed in the American government on this. We have had a significant warning and we've seen the virus in multiple countries and the response has been so lackluster. Why should we wait 20 days for things to get terrible before going to quarantines and lock down? Surely China and Italy have shown us our future. I partly think the problem is political. If you quarantine and the virus is controlled,…

> I partly think the problem is political. If you quarantine and the virus is controlled, then it looks like you panicked over nothing, because you took this huge reaction and nothing much happened. I think this is exactly what's happening. It's an extension of the way individuals feel -- no one wants to be seen preparing too early, because people might think they're silly.

obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/2278/

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

#573

Post by giu »

nickserv wrote: post #519
esistgut wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

I spent a few months in the region with a sick toddler and can attest to the speed, quality and friendliness of the public health system there. That the virus is spreading so quickly, and that the health system is getting overwhelmed is cause for real concern. If northern Italy can't handle the outbreak, I'm not sure anywhere will do much better.

I'm very worried about southern Italy; the medical infrastructures are not really top-notch down there, sadly.

Disclaimer: I've spent quite a lot of holidays in the south, since both my parents grew up there.

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

#574

Post by toyg »

xienze wrote: post #307
pengaru wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it almost feels like Trump has some secret weapons ready to save the day. You would think that, since most of the leaders are in a high risk demographic and spend large chunk of their time shaking hands with strangers, they would be more vigilant He's behaving entirely consistently with how he always has: deny everything, project perfection. There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show.

> He's behaving entirely consistently with how he always has: deny everything, project perfection. > There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show. Can't really disagree, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with the way people in the US are talking about the response now. Was the US MSM not spending all of January and February telling us "calm down, you know the common flu kills WAY more peo…

The two statements don’t need be false or contradict the fact that it was mishandled.

A flight ban simply makes traceability harder, as people reroute through multiple hops. Victimizing Chinese communities is bad and will only make things worse (as people start hiding from authorities). And in the end, the virus was in Germany already in January, according to the tracing, so focusing on China would have helped little.

BUT

they could have mandated self-isolation for two weeks for all flight passengers disembarking, regardless of provenience. You get a tourism hit but slow down infection rates substantially.

They could have ensured better procedure for care in death. Those elderly people dying in high number right now, have probably infected hundreds of others already; they should have been tested weeks ago, and handled as infection carriers.

They could have prepared temporary field hospitals to spike capacity like the Chinese were forced to do. Chances are they will need them anyway, might as well do it advance than later under pressure.

They could have started shutting down large gatherings and prepare for curfew measures.

They’ve done none of that - and I say “they” as in US administration, UK administration, Australia (where they’ll even host a F1 GP with crowds this weekend!), France etc... They all hoped it would go away “on its own” like SARS did. Sadly, SARS was a lucky strike, this is the real deal.

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

#575

Post by hef19898 »

newtoday wrote: post #413
Ma8ee wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the us something as simple as paid sick leave for all service workers could make a huge difference.

In the past 5 days, some organizations who can afford it have shut down offices and are providing just that. I'm not at liberty to expose info on who, because I'm not sure it's been made public or not.

So, assuming you won't name the org you are working at, what prevents you from naming some of the others?

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

#576

Post by makomk »

bdamm wrote: post #364
asdfaoeu wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is the incubation period is around 5 days. So really the numbers are at least 5 days behind.

And of course in the US there are not as many testing kits as in other countries, so the numbers are basically 3 months behind.

Not really. Even though the US media has focused on the raw number of tests carried out for domestic political reasons and left a lot of people with the belief that the number of confirmed cases is basically just a function of the number of tests, Italy has been visibly struggling to test people. If you look at the percentage of tests that came out positive rather than the absolute numbers, it's obvious that Italy was only testing people who were very likely to have the disease, especially during and after the big spike in cases that got everyone's attention. It was in the very high single digits for quite a while, compared to the 3% that the CDC's old, very restrictive policy of only testing a handful of people very likely to have it There's other evidence that Italy's numbers were off too.

I'm particularly miffed about this because it seems to have spread to our shores and convinced a bunch of people that the reason the UK has lower numbers than Italy is because they're not testing people, to the point they're literally unable to believe that Italy has only tested twice as many patients for the coronavirus as the UK.

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

#577

Post by KnightOfWords »

joe_the_user wrote: post #534
llamataboot wrote: post #458

The US really really /really/ needs to get out in front of this. We have the lowest per-capita testing rate in the world, there are likely already significant outbreaks in Seattle, Santa Clara co, NYC, and DC. Probably elsewhere. We are literally like 12 days behind and can see into our future. If this virus does indeed require such intense hospital resources (as in Wuhan and now Northern Italy) letting it spike is j…

Well, The only thing that be called reasonable statistic is the number of deaths and that hasn't spiked - I hate to say - yet. It's possible hospitals are even missing those, it's a big country. And it's a dispersed country so things might not spread as quickly. But other, what you say. Stopping large public events and doing mass testing seems crucial. South Korea seems to have gotten a handle on their infection proc…

It takes 6-41 days for covid-19 to kill, with 14 days being the median. The death rate is going to lag behind the cases of infection by a few days.

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

#578

Post by Tepix »

mariushn wrote: post #464
muyuan wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a Chinese living in Bay Area. What's described by the Italian doctor was exactly like the situation in Wuhan right after the lockdown for the first 2-3 weeks. Unfortunately, I think it will hit Italy harder this time, China locked down Wuhan but every other provinces send in supplies and doctors to help, just building new hospitals is not enough, and I don't see France/Germany doing the same to Italy. The US res…

[sarcasm] Because the virus is fake news: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697... https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370245512943820... I'm amazed not only at these affirmations, but at the likes they get. Incredible.

Wow. I actively avoid reading Trumps tweets, it seems everytime I run across them eventually, it's so much worse.

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

#579

Post by ben_w »

zo1 wrote: post #473
chadcmulligan wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These politicians are representative of their voters, as democracy should be. Isn't it that they make decisions on behalf of the voters and should take the best professional advice on their behalf?

Professional advice is not necessarily the best political advise, unfortunately. It's a giant PR/social-media game and they have to play it otherwise the other side will get the upper hand. It's very unfortunate that we've turned "democracy" into such a game instead of a mechanism for societal-level decision making.

Democracy is just as vulnerable to Goodhart's law as everything else.

I don’t have any well-thought-out solutions, but I am tickled by the idea of frequently anarchically randomising the way power gets donated from the people to the government.

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

#580

Post by hef19898 »

cm2187 wrote: post #552
moultano wrote: post #271

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…

I am struggling to reconcile this story with the numbers of deaths so far vs the number of deaths in any given year. A french infectious disease specialist mentioned that 2017 had been a bad year for infectious respiratory diseases in France, with over 60,000 additional deaths in winter, to the point that it affected life expectancy tables [1]. I don’t remember any mention of hospitals being overwhelmed and doing war…

Which shows how damn important context is. Without 100% testing (which I don't think to be necessary) for COVID-19 and comaprative baselines case numbers aren't tellig us anything. Without the proper domain expertise to actually interpret the numbers that is. So whithout that particular domain expertise, epidemilogy and virology, I don't interpret the numbers or build models, rather I believe the experts to make sense out of them.
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