361–370 of 410 posts
One tangential snippet that I heard but I don't know if it is true or not is that in Northern Italy, there are whole garment factories that are staffed and possibly owned by Chinese purely so that they can be designated as Italian clothing manufacturers.
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Ebola never got to America.
I am not American, and there were infected people in my country. We had a right wing government then also, and since all the media is left wing here, they made an incredibly huge deal out of it. And now nobody remembers a thing.
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Most hospitals don't have all that much slack in bed capacity; especially at the tail end of flu season most of those beds are already filled. The hospitals may be extrapolating the growth rate of the disease and realizing how soon they will have problems. Or given the nature of the outbreak it could be that even within Lombardy there are areas with much higher concentrations of cases, like there are more cases, inc.…
> Most hospitals don't have all that much slack in bed capacity; especially at the tail end of flu season Remember that there's a difference between hospital beds and ICU beds. In the UK, we maintain 80% utilisation of our ICU beds all year round[0], with very little change in the number of beds available in real number terms. We have ~4100 total ICU beds, which can be expanded to ~5000 if all operating theatres, etc…
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Pretty much the US just introduced the security measures other countries had had for years before.
The TSA has been proven many times over to be totally ineffectual security theater - theres this popular report from a few years back that the TSA has a 95% failure rate when their measures are tested[1]. It doesn't go anywhere because there is now a lot of private industry in it for contract money to supply the spectacle whom have the lobbying power to keep it in place, but it is a total waste of money and gross vio…
In particular you'll see other countries focus on measures like interviewing (briefly) the passengers as they board.
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I just read an article that claimed Lombardy has 737 ICU beds available for covid 19. Given Italy has a 3.18 beds per 1000 people that means they have less than 3% of their hospital beds available for covid 19 patients. That's absurd. In relation the USA has roughly 14% of their beds as ICU beds according to a reference from https://www.sccm.org/Communications/Critical-Care-Statistics
You seem to think that for some reason, ICU beds go unused except in a situation like this? ICU capacity is probably built to meet some fraction of demand in normal circumstances. Those beds weren't all unused before this outbreak started. 737 ICU beds available isn't the same as the total number of ICU beds. Normal health problems that need hospital treatment (strokes, heart attacks, car accidents, etc.) are still h…
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/…
In Italy, it is almost customary to pop medication that contains antibiotics whenever you feel a bit under the weather. I lived in Italy, I experienced this first hand even from my more educated friends.
Because of this Italians have an antibiotics resistance of 26.8% [1].
I do not have data for South Korea but in Germany, where I live, antibiotics are not available over the counter. You always need to see a professional and then they are much more expensive that e.g. in Italy.
The resistance rate here in Germany is 0.4% [1]. That's 67 times (!) lower than in Italy.
[1] https://atlas.ecdc.europa.eu/public/index.aspx?Dataset=27&He...
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This doesn’t account for it because South Korea didn’t even have the number of serious cases that Italy has. The real answer is simply that the number of tests is not equal to the number of cases. The number of positive tests is a factor of the number of tests done, and how selective the testing was allowed to be. It is only loosely related to the number of infected people (technically it is the lower bound).
>>"The real answer is simply that the number of tests is not equal to the number of cases." I think you are right, but, assuming all the deaths are reported, the obvious implication is that the mortality rate is a lot lower than 3% If fact, looking to Germany, I would say that it's around 0.2, 0.3 % That would be the good news, the bad news is that it's extremely contagious, probably because nobody is immune to this…
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> Because they are overwhelmed Italian hospitals basically send people home if they have a fever or other symptoms with no test administered, Sources, please. > only people having trouble breathing being admitted in the ICU. Well, why would you put someone without respiratory failure in an ICU to egin with? Also, Italy performs 1 test per 1000 people [1]. Surely there are more cases than the reported ones, but 10 tim…
Did they test random people or only people with symptoms? If the latter then your distribution is heavily biased and a 10x difference is not an outlier, it's the expected outcome.
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No, the far more likely explanation is that the total number of cases reported for Italy don't reflect reality. Because they are overwhelmed Italian hospitals basically send people home if they have a fever or other symptoms with no test administered, instructed to come back in case the symptoms worsen, only people having trouble breathing being admitted in the ICU. Italy could easily have in reality 10 times the num…
> Because they are overwhelmed Italian hospitals basically send people home if they have a fever or other symptoms with no test administered, Sources, please. > only people having trouble breathing being admitted in the ICU. Well, why would you put someone without respiratory failure in an ICU to egin with? Also, Italy performs 1 test per 1000 people [1]. Surely there are more cases than the reported ones, but 10 tim…
In the initial weeks of the crisis, the Italian government said that they would switch to only reporting symptomatic cases [1] ("because that what every body else is doing") instead of all positive tests. I do not know if they followed through, but that would make a large difference if Korea was reporting everything.
edit: as far as I understand, that only changes what they report in the official numbers that make the news. The actual medical data might contain the real numbers.
edit2: if they started doing what they said they would, the actual positive rate would be even higher. So the issue is likely that they are just not testing as much.
[1] https://www.wired.it/scienza/medicina/2020/02/28/coronavirus... (in Italian)
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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
Singapore has been competent, but Taiwan's response has been more impressive. It's very close to the hot zone, millions of people travel to and from mainland China every year, it has roughly the population of Australia living on 10% of the land Japan has, the WHO refuses any cooperation, and yet there have been under 50 cases and no local transmission. Not only that, but as a democratic state, Taiwan's control measur…
The safest country will be China because their measures are more effective and they have been really tested by the situation.
See how TW will respond if they get an actual outbreak. They will:
- cover it up
- blame China
- blame each other
- and crucially not be able to contain it.
That's the politics of that place, which seems to need to prioritize self-preservation, appearances and emotionality over results, like all democratic governments. Unlike China.
This is so, which despite claiming to "live there" you clearly do not understand. Whatever. Know-it-alls like you are so often wrong, faker dude.