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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

#631

Post by hef19898 »

rorykoehler wrote: post #625
hef19898 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in Bavaria at least, people are forced to self-quarantine for two weeks if they had contact to people from o where in high risk areas. Same goes for children in schools and kindergardens. Some schools are closed already. Corporate travel came more or less to a halt and soccer games are most likely taking place without spectators. So yes, just business as usual.

I'm in Berlin and people are making zero effort to alter their usual patterns.

As of yesterday, Berlin is no way a risk zone as of now. So why should they? Doesnt mean you can't change your behaviour, so.

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

#632

Post by majewsky »

ben_w wrote: post #579
zo1 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I somewhat like the idea of having a democracy without parliament or elections. Instead, whenever a law needs to be made (either because the administration identifies the need or because something akin to a ballot initiative gets enough signatures) 100 people are drawn from the population at random and tasked with writing that law. They are allowed to summon/subpoena as many experts as they like to help them with drafting the law.

The idea is that every citizen would be involved in one, maybe two laws in their entire lifetime, therefore giving them the sense that this is the one time they can contribute to politics in a meaningful way. Also their names are tied to that particular law forever, meaning that fear of social pressure could be more effective than for a politician who votes for 1000s of things in their political career.

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

#633

Post by joking »

atemerev wrote: post #502
mantap wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because at the beginning, a logistic curve is often confused with exponential growth. There are very few truly exponential processes in the nature. All things come to an end. Epidemics, population growth, economic growth... no such thing as exponential growth with limited resources.

the logistic curve is what happens to the initial exponential grow when there's no more way to grow, because there is no more population to infect or when severe social exclusion is set, but the initial grow is still exponential.

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

#634

Post by GabrielBen »

esistgut wrote: post #281
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…

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:…

The CDC is updating their recommendations for healthcare providers several times a day. There's plenty of epidemiologists working on this topic in the us: shutting down airports and roads also kill people and it has varying effects depending on the point of the epidemic you are in.

I can't believe I'm saying this as a libertarian but you have to put some faith into the government's action here. The public in a panic already took away all the masks healthcare providers needed to safely attend patients, diminishing the capacity to serve.

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

#635

Post by LandR »

hnaccy wrote: post #272
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…

Does that mean they're just triaging them and letting them die?

In the UK one of our top health people said that if this gets out of control "hard decisions will have to be made"

That's basically a nice way of saying "We will have to let people die"

If you don't have beds and incubutors, you can't treat people. Then people start dying.

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

#636

Post by makomk »

grey-area wrote: post #607
makomk wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" t…

The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

The "U.S. pandemic response team" that article is talking about were White House staff, part of the Trump administration rather than the non-partisan bureaucracy. The actual, on-the-ground organisations and bureaucracy involved in pandemic response - the stuff most people would probably think of as the pandemic response team and that the comment I'm replying to seems to suggest should be in charge - is still there. The staff it's talking about were also all part of the national security side of the administration rather than the health side, and of course it's the health side which is in charge of the CDC and the FDA.

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

#637

Post by hef19898 »

Scarblac wrote: post #628
hef19898 wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically a measured, fact based response to it. Sounds good if you ask me! Especially the education campaign is thoroughly missed at the moment.

I'm hoping TV crews get into Lombardy hospitals and show the West what is happening there, it might get people to take this seriously. But then someone needs to also give them clear instructions or it will just be panic.

That brings me back to my core question. What are people not taking serious about it? I get it that some people a scred and feel better when other share tht feeling, and they get external confirmation from th outside. But does this actually do any good? I don't think so.

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

#638

Post by hef19898 »

drclau wrote: post #517
mantap wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

A couple of weeks ago it was "China was slow and it turned into a disaster". Now China was fast and Italy is turining into a disaster. Someties it seems that people want to be that a disaster, so they push that narrative. Same thing happens with the deniers, so.

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

#639

Post by hef19898 »

krisoft wrote: post #563
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?

But if you don’t understand exponential growth and you look at China’s example you might think (mistakenly): “they had this illness and over reacted. Look how much it hurt their economy, and it wasn’t even anything big as it turns out!” This is obviously wrong, but you can’t recognise the precipice they pulled themselves back from without understanding exponential growth itself.

Or you could look at it, say "it looks like exponential, but I am no expert on diseases, so I don't know what I am looking at."

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

#640

Post by ghego1 »

hef19898 wrote: post #530
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…

Am I the only to catch the very first sentence? "From a well respected friend and intensivist/A&E consultant who is currently in northern Italy:" Basically, that make this twitter thread uncorborated news unless someone reached out to the Italian doctor referenced in it.

I am from Italy and every single friend of mine working in healthcare as a doctor has confirmed me that the situation is like the one described here. A friend of mine who is an orthopedist outside lomdardia has also confirmed that they have already asked him to work extra hours and they are already at full capacity, so he's preparing to assist covid patients.

Personally I know a girl whose soon-to-be husband from zero symptoms went to being intubated in 3 days. Luckily for him there were still machines available and he's relatively young and in good shape so they have allocated it to him.

One can surely ignore these reports as they are not provided first hand by doctors. In that case it is sufficient to wait. Soon this situation will be a reality in many more regions/countries so it will be easy to experience this first hand.

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