201–210 of 410 posts
This outbreak is a litmus test for the competence of countries. It's already shone a bright light on the fragility of global supply lines, cheap travel and open borders. These are the aspects of life most likely to change after this is all over.
> South Korea has since reported 67 deaths out of nearly 8,000 confirmed cases, after testing more than 222,000 people. In contrast, Italy has had 1,016 deaths and identified more than 15,000 cases after carrying out more than 73,000 tests on an unspecified number of people. Surely the testing is a huge factor. Test more people you'll find more people infected, so the fatality rate will get smaller. If you're like th…
I think the masks are more likely to be having an impact.
Reminder for those in despair... It is merely enough to make the r0 after containment measures less than 1. Then the problem will eventually go away. As someone said, social distancing measures to work must be done when it seems to be overreacting. And if they work, it will seem as if we overreacted.
Your last line is the super important point, occurred to me today as well. If we beat this thing with social distancing, idiots will say "See! There was no reason to panic!"
They boasted about buying now cheap tickets to fly on vacation instead of "suffering through" home office as ordered by our company.
These are educated people. Doesn't seem to save them from ignorance though, as they are on the "just a flu" train.
Italy has an older population, hence more susceptible to deaths and spreading of the virus: - Average age of death due to Coronavirus in Italy is 82 [1] - In Italy, 3.65% of the population is 80 or older [2]. - In Korea, 1.75% of the population is 80 or older [3] [1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/covid-19... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2019/ [3] https://www.populationpyramid.net/…
And additionally the spread of virus is not uniform as it depends on social circles, so it's very hard to compare the situations using just general population stats. In South Korea one of the early patients infected more than a thousand other people, while some patients infected no one else or only a few. It's totally random event, and a few patients like that can create a huge differences in the spread of the disease. In Italy they've had the bad luck that early on virus got into hospitals and retirement homes, so the most sensitive population was massively affected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The part of Italy hit also has air quality, per aqi searches, that is comparable to the region in China that was hit hard. Have people looked that it is not age, but baseline damage to your lungs that is the main factor in serious cases? Older people will have more exposure to local air pollution, just from having lived longer. That existing damage can be what contributes to complications, right?
Source? Right now air in Wuhan [0] seems to be significantly worse than Milan [1]. Both cities are under some level of quarantine, but it has been stricter and going on for much longer in Wuhan. Chinese sources say that the air in Wuhan is much better than it was before the quarantine. We can assume that the difference between the two cities would be even larger during normal activity. Edit: Milan is much closer to S…
Edit: and the air being better after the quarantine would support my hypothesis. It wasn't that that helped, but the better air. (Which is still very bad)
Is there any map of the spread within Italy (or any other country) region wise, so that one could see how effected different regions are, and how region wise quarantined have worked.
This outbreak is a litmus test for the competence of countries. It's already shone a bright light on the fragility of global supply lines, cheap travel and open borders. These are the aspects of life most likely to change after this is all over.
>These are the aspects of life most likely to change after this is all over. People will forget about this in a year and go back to life like it's always been. Short term convenience trumps everything except short term negative consequences.
Expect even emptier shelves way earlier when the next epidemic comes.
Interesting detail in the article: in Korea testing is free if referred by a doctor, or it is up to 140$ if you just want to be tested.
Having a fever, and enough money, I’d happily pay $140 for the peace of mind that comes with that test.
If you got tested weekly, the costs would soon mount up.....
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…