Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 410 posts

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#161

Post by gattilorenz »

joe_the_user wrote: post #125
Retric wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large number of South Korea infections are even younger due to how it spread. Italy: Above 80: 1,532 (18.4)% vs age 20-29: 296 (0.0)% South Korea: Above 80: 243 (3.1)% age 20-29: 2,261 (28.7)% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I... Of note, neither country has had anyone under 30 die. Deaths in the 80+ age range are 8.23% in So…

A large number of South Korea infections are even younger due to how it spread. Another possibility is that Italy doesn't have a handle on who is or isn't infected so what they report are the obvious infections, who tend to be older.

In many (technically former) "red zones", especially in Lombardy, they tested also asyntomatic family members of infected people, or their contacts. I'm not sure how inaccurate it is, but I have no idea what has been done in SK.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#162

Post by aquadrop »

taeric wrote: post #110
yongjik wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan simply isn't testing enough patients, so I would wait a few weeks before judging how well they did. That said, inconceivably they don't have many serious cases. (If the virus was really spreading exponentially, we'd certainly see a lot more patients, tests or no tests.) So they must be doing something right. It's just hard to tell if they could keep it this way.

I said it up thread, but curious to get more responses. My hypothesis is this had already spread like crazy everywhere. Now we just are seeing the exponential discovery of it. What marks the places hardest hit with severe cases is the bad air quality. Which acts as a further agitator on lung related complications.

Norway has very good air quality and still relatively hard hit.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#163

Post by aquadrop »

yongjik wrote: post #97
enitihas wrote: post #5

Just curious, does anybody know how did Japan manage to do so well, inspite of a very old population. Also what does HN think is the better place to be right now? A mega city or a small village?

Japan simply isn't testing enough patients, so I would wait a few weeks before judging how well they did. That said, inconceivably they don't have many serious cases. (If the virus was really spreading exponentially, we'd certainly see a lot more patients, tests or no tests.) So they must be doing something right. It's just hard to tell if they could keep it this way.

If you look at the ratio of test/positive people, and assuming that lower the ratio more wide spread testing is, Japan isn't doing bad. I don't remember exact numbers but when I looked at the numbers recently it was something like 3.5% for South Korea, 17% for Italy and 5% for Japan.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#164

Post by xpressvideoz »

What's interesting is, many South Koreans still believe the South Korean government is to blame. Perhaps no people are satisifed by their government?

Usual counterarguments are like these:

1. The government should have prevented the entry of foreign nationals who recently visited China. It could buy us some time to develop treatment to the disease. To this day, no such ban has been imposed.

2. It should have prohibited masks from being exported in January. Many masks are suspected to be exported to China, which is believed to have contributed the scarceness of masks. Thankfully, the exportation is banned now.

3. The government shifts a little too much responsibility to the cult. In addition, some people blames Daegu, where the cult made thousands of people infected, for not handling the situation properly, to prevent the central government from being blamed.

But after seeing the reactions of other countries, I'm starting to believe South Korea's actions were actually pretty good, at least relatively. What do you think?

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#165

Post by taeric »

aquadrop wrote: post #162
taeric wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said it up thread, but curious to get more responses. My hypothesis is this had already spread like crazy everywhere. Now we just are seeing the exponential discovery of it. What marks the places hardest hit with severe cases is the bad air quality. Which acts as a further agitator on lung related complications.

Norway has very good air quality and still relatively hard hit.

Do you have the numbers handy?

And note, I mean hit hard with high severity cases. Not just cases. My hypothesis is that it is already everywhere. Most of this exponential growth is just how fast we can deploy testing.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#166

Post by toolz »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #147
nostromo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how the media should report on deaths over 80, or even over 90. It's not that old people aren't worthy of protection, but when you're 85 in the US you have a 10% chance of dying in the next year for any and all reasons. So saying this disease kills 15% (for example) of 80+ year olds without context sounds horrific, but contextualized in the actual risks of just being very old to begin with, sounds much l…

Fatality numbers won't reflect those who developed permanent lung damage or had to go into intensive care. Best not to suggest anything that might down play the seriousness considering how infectious this virus is. (Otherwise it may encourage risky behavior.)

but what about the risks of over-selling this disease? Look at Italy for example. I've read self-reports from healthcare workers claiming 200% hospital capacity. I can only image the needless death resulting from such panic.

Mind you that isn't covid 19 putting them over-capacity. In the worst hit region in Italy (Lombardy) confirmed covid 19 cases represent enough cases to take up less than 10% of their hospital beds. So it seems incredibly unlikely anything but panic is to blame for such absurdly high over capacity.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#167

Post by koheripbal »

nostromo wrote: post #95
Retric wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large number of South Korea infections are even younger due to how it spread. Italy: Above 80: 1,532 (18.4)% vs age 20-29: 296 (0.0)% South Korea: Above 80: 243 (3.1)% age 20-29: 2,261 (28.7)% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I... Of note, neither country has had anyone under 30 die. Deaths in the 80+ age range are 8.23% in So…

I'm not sure how the media should report on deaths over 80, or even over 90. It's not that old people aren't worthy of protection, but when you're 85 in the US you have a 10% chance of dying in the next year for any and all reasons. So saying this disease kills 15% (for example) of 80+ year olds without context sounds horrific, but contextualized in the actual risks of just being very old to begin with, sounds much l…

You will not feel this way when you're 80

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#168

Post by toolz »

black_puppydog wrote: post #117
nostromo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how the media should report on deaths over 80, or even over 90. It's not that old people aren't worthy of protection, but when you're 85 in the US you have a 10% chance of dying in the next year for any and all reasons. So saying this disease kills 15% (for example) of 80+ year olds without context sounds horrific, but contextualized in the actual risks of just being very old to begin with, sounds much l…

you could also say that for people 80 and above, this epidemic will more than double their already significant chances of dying this year...

That's a really hard thing to say this early. For all we know many 80+ people are asymptomatic and most older people aren't negatively affected at all by covid 19. It seems really dangerous to conflate actual mortality rate with mortality rate among the confirmed cases. Those numbers will be drastically different with diseases that have many asymptomatic carriers.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#169

Post by asjw »

black_puppydog wrote: post #117
nostromo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how the media should report on deaths over 80, or even over 90. It's not that old people aren't worthy of protection, but when you're 85 in the US you have a 10% chance of dying in the next year for any and all reasons. So saying this disease kills 15% (for example) of 80+ year olds without context sounds horrific, but contextualized in the actual risks of just being very old to begin with, sounds much l…

you could also say that for people 80 and above, this epidemic will more than double their already significant chances of dying this year...

My parents are in the range

And they live in Italy

Still the heat wave in 2003 killed 18 thousands people in a month and 15k in France in only half a month.

Old people are vulnerable to many things, unfortunately

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#170

Post by microcolonel »

ericd wrote: post #83
Diederich wrote: post #34

I noticed something else that might be an interesting correlation: available "acute" hospital beds. I don't have time to do the full correlation, but here's the data: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=30183 Select "Curative (acute) care beds" Scroll down to the Per 1000 population. Italy: 2.62 Korea (assuming South): 7.14 The list of countries in that table is a good bit shorter than the countries fighting Co…

Shoot... United States: 2.44 Interestingly, that's 20% lower than in 2000 (3.04) At least Japan is in an OK spot, at 7.79

> Interestingly, that's 20% lower than in 2000 (3.04)

Almost the exact trend in Canada. I hope this is just a quirk of the data, because we would be screwed for this in 2000, and being at least 20% more screwed means we're extra screwed.

In effect, it seems that in Canada have fewer overall hospital beds per capita than Italy has acute care beds.

We are completely unprepared, and in terms of time, not far behind Italy.

Post reply on HN