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

reuters.com

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

#331

Post by pif »

landryraccoon wrote: post #183
marcinzm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

No. I remember 9/11, and this feels worse. The world won’t be the same for a decade. Are you too young to remember when you could just walk straight onto a plane without being searched? Those days never came back.

> I remember 9/11

It's not the same stuff! Terrorism is backed by people actively wanting to harm other human beings, while the appearance of a new dangerous virus is a random process.

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

#332

Post by pif »

PeterStuer wrote: post #74

There's sooooo many lies being propagated by different governments on the true state of things. This afternoon I watched a live broadcast of parliament in which the minister of health claimed Belgium was doing far more extensive testing than any other country on earth. This at a time when standing instructions to medical personnel are to only test people that are already admitted to hospital because of severe pulmona…

> There's sooooo many lies being propagated by different governments

Just a question, if I may: how do you know that? Which international sources do you have that justify you releasing such a strong statement?

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

#333

Post by pif »

2019-nCoV wrote: post #13

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.

> It's already shone a bright light on the fragility of global supply lines, cheap travel and open borders.

Are you serious? Those are the things that have given us so much prosperity in the last decades, and indeed no government has dared interrupt the flow until it has become unavoidable due to major national heath danger.

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

#334

Post by pmontra »

refurb wrote: post #207
marcinzm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I can imagine that the one thing people will remember is stocking up on supplies. Expect even emptier shelves way earlier when the next epidemic comes.

People stocked up supplies all over Europe when Chernobyl happened. This is not what we remember most. What we remember is "nuclear is dangerous". Some countries decommissioned their own power plants and didn't build new ones anymore. Example: Italy.

I'm sure that if everything ends well I'll remember being at home for a few weeks. I'm sure this is going to be a major turning point in history (more than Chernobyl and 9/11) but I'm not betting on what's going to be the direction it takes.

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

#335

Post by zimmerfrei »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #320
ddeck wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This is very likely the case, as can be seen in the positive test outcome rates. 16.7% in Italy vs. 3.6% in South Korea Italy has run around 60k tests. South Korea are testing around 15k people/day and have tested 234k people in total. They've even setup drive-thro…

So if we assume a similar death rate, we could use the deaths to estimate how many are actually infected in Italy?

Yes, not only in Italy, but in most other places. This article explains well how deaths (or hospitalizations) are correlated to actual infections (most of which go unnoticed), and also why reduction of social interaction is effective but its effects take a while to show:

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

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

#336

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

zjs wrote: post #254
tooltalk wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but not compared to other developed countries (except England): [1] [2] Germany 3.7 24.6 France 3.3 9.3 England 2.7 3.3 USA 2.4 20 Canada 2.4 13.5 Japan 2.2 4 to 5 1. Ratio of physicians to patients (per 1,000 population) 2. Number of ICU beds (per 100,000 population)

Do you have a source for those numbers? They differ significantly from https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=30183 , but perhaps your source is more reliable. Edit: nevermind, I misunderstood the definition of "Curative care (acute care) beds in hospitals".

Now that you understood it, can you explain what the difference is? It's not obvious to me either.

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

#337

Post by rasz »

kijin wrote: post #323
toyg wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik they’ve already started with that in one the affected regions.

Yeah, I also heard that China is sending to Italy the materials they don't need anymore, since they started dismantling the temporary hospitals in Wuhan. That would be very helpful.

>temporary hospitals

were not hospitals at all, just isolation units for temp quarantine

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

#338

Post by js8 »

zanny wrote: post #270
js8 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO one consequence will be death of neoliberalism (started with Reagan/Thatcher but going philosophically to Hayek and Friedman). It is quite likely that U.S. will nationalize health care as a response to this crisis. But more broadly, the idea that government is a useless economic actor and shouldn't dictate economic policy will become laughable in the response to the crisis.

> It is quite likely that U.S. will nationalize health care as a response to this crisis. If you think half the country infected with a virus and a million deaths is enough to topple a several hundred billion dollar insurance racket that has endured for over half a century exploiting health and wellbeing for profit... I wish we would get single payer out of this, but the plague of greed in medicine is way too deep to…

I think you should stop saying it is impossible. You know, billions just vanished on the stock market.

If enough people will believe that it is possible to change, it will change.

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

#339

Post by powerapple »

js2 wrote: post #67
rb808 wrote: post #33

> 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…

Singapore is probably doing as best as any country could hope to. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/12/8145224... Also, as an American, I'm embarrassed by my country's response and by how my president addresses the nation. PM Lee shows how you talk to your country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mYs1Uyx3c8 His original address five weeks prior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dExr76Wckr8

Being a small country definitely helps in situation like this, it is not likely US as a big country can be as effective as Singapore. What do you want the government to do? lock down cities with troops?

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

#340

Post by thinkingemote »

Its not tests we should be counting but the number of people seriously sick and work back from that.

If we know that a percentage of the population will get hospitalised we can get a good estimate of the actual infected population.

I think that the UK estimates that 10K people have it in the UK for example. (Number may be wrong, but they have produced an estimate based on the number of sick who tested positive)

The UK is basically saying, currently, to not expect to be tested, that you will get it and that they have good knowledge of the levels. They are testing sick people in hospitals only. They also say that advice is likely to change each week.

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