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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

#851

Post by pjc50 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #815
pjc50 wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I mostly wish is that citizens could throw some sort of flag now to say "This crisis is being poorly handled. If this goes badly, let's have a review, figure out why, and correct the problem once this is settled." The election season is in full swing and you should have the opportunity to vote on how well you think the crisis has been handled by November.

What I want though is a report that explains what incorrect actions the government took and the proximate and ultimate causes for those reactions. I want the causes addressed so we'll do better in the future. Example: Why didn't we start testing with 100x or 1000x the number of tests? Maybe the reason is regulation on independent labs doing their own tests. Maybe there wasn't enough money banked up at the CDC such th…

Well, cutting funding and firing staff from the CDC can't have helped. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

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

#852

Post by remus »

tomp wrote: post #829
licebmi__at__ wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the POTUS should be held to a higher standard than this meme tier tweets. But hey, it have been almost 4 years, I guess we should be used to.

Sure, but what higher standard is that? The standard of "don't panic", currently followed by WHO and pretty much all heads of state (with possible exceptions being Putin and possibly Italy & Austria), or the standard of "panic", universally shunned by experts and wanna-be experts alike?

You can say "don't panic" without misleading people by using numbers completely out of context.

By comparing the number of Corona virus cases and deaths to the annual flu deaths he is implying that the number of deaths from Corona virus in the US is low and the risk is negligible, and while it is currently low this completely misses the point that in other countries it has proven to be extremely contagious and has a much higher mortality rate than flu. In other words, there is a significant risk if adequate steps aren't taken to reduce the risk of transmission. See: Italy, China.

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

#853

Post by swordsmith »

Would make more sense for the elderly and vulnerable, and those that work/live in close proximity with those to be self-quarantined. Makes little sense to apply those measures to the young and healthy, for whom the effects (both symptoms and mortality rate) are similar to contracting flu without vaccine.

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

#854

Post by ALittleLight »

bluGill wrote: post #840
ALittleLight wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want though is a report that explains what incorrect actions the government took and the proximate and ultimate causes for those reactions. I want the causes addressed so we'll do better in the future. Example: Why didn't we start testing with 100x or 1000x the number of tests? Maybe the reason is regulation on independent labs doing their own tests. Maybe there wasn't enough money banked up at the CDC such th…

How do you start testing with 100x the number of tests? You have to figure out how to make a test this takes time in itself. The disease is only a few months old so it isn't like there was time to prepare. This is a very hard supply management problem. Don't forget to account for tests that fail quality control, something that happens but can't be predicted.

South Korea has done almost 4k tests per million people. Guangdong in China has done 3k per million. The US has done 5 tests per million. That's three orders of magnitude worse than China or South Korea. Explanations like "This is a hard problem" or "There wasn't enough time" are simply unacceptable given that other countries are doing dramatically better.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing-covid-19...

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

#855

Post by rorykoehler »

hef19898 wrote: post #816
ulfw wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. And you magically know that how, exactly?

May have changed, but yesterday Berlin wasn't listed in the high risk regions that was shared by Bavarian health authorities. Didn't check today, so. EDIT: According to officials, one county in germany is considered high risk (link in German): https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

It's futile arguing that the risk is low because the officials classified it as such when I stated that I disagree with their risk assessment and management strategy. If I look at a risk matrix I would classify the risk impact of not quarantining as significant to disastrous and the likelihood as very likely. That puts the current situation in all of the world at the highest risk.

Risk matrix example: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kevin_Fleming3/publicat...

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

#856

Post by Jare »

fulvioterzapi wrote: post #523
Jare wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Italy is doing a bit worse that all other governments It is the first western government to fucking react (even if forced to) and show everyone else the road ahead. And everyone else keeps acting like they hope it's not going to happen to them.

The Titanic was the first transatlantic ship to "fucking react" to an iceberg. Is this a point of pride?

> The Titanic was the first transatlantic ship to "fucking react" to an iceberg

That's both funny and totally not true.

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

#857

Post by hef19898 »

rorykoehler wrote: post #855
hef19898 wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May have changed, but yesterday Berlin wasn't listed in the high risk regions that was shared by Bavarian health authorities. Didn't check today, so. EDIT: According to officials, one county in germany is considered high risk (link in German): https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

It's futile arguing that the risk is low because the officials classified it as such when I stated that I disagree with their risk assessment and management strategy. If I look at a risk matrix I would classify the risk impact of not quarantining as significant to disastrous and the likelihood as very likely. That puts the current situation in all of the world at the highest risk. Risk matrix example: https://www.res…

One last comment because you clearly seem to prefer to live in your own world.

Assessing risk the way you do has one big issue (it actually has multiple but let's stick with one). When you put Corona in the disastrous category you habe to provide reasons for doing so, otherwise it is just a gut feeling. And by classifying it as disastrous, you run into issues when classifying stuff like Ebola for example. Over-classifying has that effect on measuring systems, that's why you need teams of experts from multiple disciplines to do it properly. And would have to do so at multiple sub levels for each criteria. The whole purpose is to take gut feeling and emotions out of the process. Doing it alone makes the whole exercise pointless.

Now, take that whatever way you want.

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

#858

Post by hef19898 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #848
hef19898 wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epidemics don't follow exponential functions. You are aware of that?

They do until they hit their inflection point.

Which they do by themselves. Not everyone who is infected dies, survivors develop a certain level of immunity (generally speaking), cured people don't infect other people. Some people are "immune" right from the start. So epidemics slow down, the part of a given population not getting it or infecting others increases with time. Which automatically slows down the spreading of the disease.

All measures we take optimize for that. Vaccination increase the amount of immune people, quarantine pulls the inflection point forward and slows the spreading. Protecting the most at risk population further reduces the risk of spreading. And so on. So yes, the early phases are exponential. But the later phases are not. So modelling this thing exponentially against the max. number people on earth is just wrong.

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

#859

Post by anigbrowl »

chinathrow wrote: post #790
realusername wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree, it will be a disaster in Europe but the US will be even worse, absolutely nothing is prepared for that.

Now if you think about the US even worse, what are you thinking about under-developped nations? Africa?

No clue. Given the way it seems to be more deadly for older people or those with comorbidities African countries may not have as big a % of the population at risk, plus it might not travel as fast there as there is less commercial and discretionary travel. But it's easy to think of other factors which would make it far worse.

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

#860

Post by rglullis »

hef19898 wrote: post #857
rorykoehler wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's futile arguing that the risk is low because the officials classified it as such when I stated that I disagree with their risk assessment and management strategy. If I look at a risk matrix I would classify the risk impact of not quarantining as significant to disastrous and the likelihood as very likely. That puts the current situation in all of the world at the highest risk. Risk matrix example: https://www.res…

One last comment because you clearly seem to prefer to live in your own world. Assessing risk the way you do has one big issue (it actually has multiple but let's stick with one). When you put Corona in the disastrous category you habe to provide reasons for doing so, otherwise it is just a gut feeling. And by classifying it as disastrous, you run into issues when classifying stuff like Ebola for example. Over-classi…

This over-reliance on "experts" is what got things to this state in the first place. Not that long ago, WHO was adamant in saying that flying to China was still okay and that "there was no reason to take extreme measures". How many lives were lost because of that?

Conversely, had they recommended more aggressive contention measures, how many trips would have been avoided? How much slower would the virus come to Europe? If sirens were ringing 4 weeks ago by the WHO "experts", perhaps Italy wouldn't need to be in lockdown now.

> When you put Corona in the disastrous category you habe to provide reasons for doing so, otherwise it is just a gut feeling.

Not really. We put in the disastrous category because we don't have enough information to claim that it is not a mass-extinction event. In the face of a threat of unknown risk and the potential impact is unbounded, we got to treat it as the worst and prepare for the worst, cost-analysis be damned!

But if you prefer to ignore me and refer to experts, please listen to Nassim Taleb, who may know a thing or two about risk analysis: https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_...

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