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

#591

Post by lormayna » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:05 AM UTC

I am living in Italy (not in the zones where the virus starts spreading) and I want to say that our healthcare system is still working even if it's struggling. The big problem is that the number of places for critical care is going to saturate; they are starting moving sick persons from Lombardia to other regions in order to reduce pressure on the critical care hospitals departments. The number of death is so high because they count person who had other illness (cancer, heart disease, etc) and because we have lot of elder persons (the probability of dying is higher for over 75).

I just hope that other government in Europe will take it seriously, because it seems spreading fast over France, Germany, Spain and Netherlands.

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

#592

Post by voqv » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #525

drclau wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t need an understanding of exponential growth, they only need to look at examples: China, extreme measures and barely contained it; Italy delayed measures, turning fast into a disaster. How many examples do we need?

In Denmark yesterday a couple of kids in the same class in a school were tested positive, they closed the classroom - not even the school. I would certainly like to see the example of a country able to learn from the mistakes of others.

In Germany a friend of mine refused to go to a meeting at a client's office where someone tested positive and HR threatened him because he was violating his employment contract.

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

#593

Post by pmayrgundter » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

cjbprime wrote: post #432

ncallaway wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what country you're from. If you're from the States (where I see a lot of denialism): Italy has 3.18 beds per 1,000 people. The United States has 2.77 beds per 1,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hosp...

Yes. Both Italy and the US are below average. South Korea and Japan, currently taking extremely drastic measures like mass-closing schools, have around 5x as many beds as either. I'm in the US, but if you think that makes me think the US is prepared, you have it backwards. I'd guess that if we're not in worse shape than Italy in two weeks, we'll be very lucky.

Agreed.

For the country as a whole, I have it at 20 days until we run out of beds. Like Italy, seems reasonable to expect some areas will hit it sooner.

Here's my growth equation:

BedsNeeded = CurrentCases * DailyGrowthRate ^ DaysOfGrowth * SevereAndCriticalRate

708 = CurrentCases, the number of COVID-19 cases in the US as of March 9, 2020. [1]

1.6 = DailyGrowthRate, Number of today's cases / Number of yesterday's cases. [2]

20 = DaysOfGrowth, how many days to run the simulation.

0.1 = SevereAndCriticalRate, the percentage of cases requiring a hospital bed. [3]

855,919 = BedsNeeded

This is based on the above-quoted 2.77 beds per 1000 people, and a US population of 327.2M people, for 906,344 beds available.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ [2] Ibid, rough average of last week's growth rate [3] Rough guess from above comments and other reading.

Working sheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15CRanm0MHyappT_3J1qc...

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

#594

Post by makomk » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #384

pacala wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure who are the "mission-focused bureaucrats" and who are the "administration loyalists" in that thread. But for the love of God, can we please stop politicizing this issue? Can we please have a moratorium on blaming the other side for whatever measures should / should not be taken? Frankly, nobody knows what to do. Here we are, pondering what to do with the kids. * The school district is open for busin…

> But for the love of God, can we please stop politicizing this issue? Can we please have a moratorium on blaming the other side for whatever measures should / should not be taken? Hard to do, when the correct thing for the administration to do is to stand back and hand decision making authority and control of resources to the bureaucracy. As long as the administration keeps interfering in the response, anything abou…

There's actually a really good test of your claim: the botched CDC rollout of testing kits. The CDC went about developing and producing the kits just like they would for any other disease under any other administration, free from meddling and micro-management, and they botched the rollout. The issue was immediately politicized. Mainstream publications made it a point of saying that it was the "Trump administration" that butched the rollout, blamed the lack of micro-management, and there's an endless wave of conspiracy theories everywhere about this being a deliberate cover-up by Trump.

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

#595

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #488

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…

The USA is a disaster waiting to happen. I've lived through a disease outbreak that required lockdown/curfews in another country and I don't think the US is logistically or culturally prepared. I don't want to go into longer detail as it will be subjective and seem political, but I'm expecting things to Get Weird.

[deleted]

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

#596

Post by afiori » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

hermitdev wrote: post #348

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.

What I've been seeing is the experts think an individual may be infectious up to 14 days before showing symptoms, hence the 2 week wuatantine.

It can be up to 21-24, even if mostly it is under 14

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

#597

Post by raxxorrax » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

muyuan wrote: post #296

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 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…

I don't have this impression. Many nations are trying to find a cure or a vaccine.

Nobody knows the long term development of this virus. You could lock up everything, the economy collapses and it would hurt people even more than the virus might have. It is a gamble at this point.

Political games come into play if people demand answers that nobody can give. If some presume to be able to do that, they are lying to your face.

If this is over in June and 100,000 people died, what would we call this? It would just be another disease probably.

For people who lost loved ones it was a catastrophe, for other part of the normal life risk. Any publicly uttered judgement has to keep that in mind, so it will always be relative. Some are more forthcoming, but probably not public officials.

Of course the virus is not under control, how could it be? I would prefer measures to reduce its spread, but that is basically intuition and listening to some doctors with the knowledge that it just buys time.

Anyone using this crisis for political points doesn't really win any cookies with me personally, on the contrary.

The incentive to cover something up is just a reflex to save face. I don't like covering something up. There is a risk of disproportionate overreaction, but I think a bad information policy reinforces this. If they covered something up, it must be really bad, right?

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

#598

Post by afiori » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:14 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #538

hef19898 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, panic is making it much more difficult to implement counter measures. It also takes away crucial man power from fighting the disease to fighting the panic. And finally, panic makes it harder for health care professionals to actually care for patients. So no, panic never helps. Staying calm and level headed does. But if you want to panic, do it. But do it in private, panic itself is rather contagious as well. Mayb…

The point I was raising was that calls to not panic suppress non-panic activities. They are sending the message that there's nothing much to worry about. This is extraordinarily dangerous. If necessary precautions will also cause some to panic, so be it. At this point, things are so looking so grim that there's no way to tell people not to panic without unacceptable downplaying of the gravity of the situation.

But then the counterpoint is that once panic steps in it becomes hard to manage. People should be called to take this seriously and to proper civic duties.

Panic is was caused the toilet paper craze.

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

#599

Post by akie » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:16 AM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #542

jiggawatts wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fixed the formatting, typos, and expanded the jargon: From a well respected friend and intensivist/A&E consultant who is currently in northern Italy: I feel the pressure to give you a quick personal update about what is happening in Italy, and also give some quick direct advice about what you should do. First, Lumbardy is the most developed region in Italy and it has a extraordinary good healthcare, I have worked i…

Did you also fix the uncoroborated nature of the news? You know, the "well respected friend" part of it by reaching out to said person? If not, this whole thing just shows again how dangerous Twitter can be in that regard.

Why are you denying the spread and severe impact of this virus? Do you think they quarantined the whole fucking country for fun?

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

#600

Post by bonzini » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

bArray wrote: post #268

usrusr wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A reason to buy a little extra would be simply to avoid going into populated areas (i.e. shopping). I think shopping is a very likely place to contract a virus given the number of times people handle the same items without washing them (think trollies, baskets, food on shelves, checkout machines, etc). That said, toilet paper in general has been driven by media hype 100%. I think I remember some early stories where i…

The truth is that they don't have the bidet.