391–400 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.
Do you remember ebola? I don't.
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You shouldn't discount the psychological factor of these things. Today, 1 day after the big move by the US to ban flights from Europe, we're seeing a lot more movement from various governments and states in taking action against the virus' spread. So even though the action itself might not be that useful, it's big enough that it gets people attention and it seems to have moved people across governments into more acti…
True but I'd still go back to the UK advice: the virus is going to spread (we aren't going to stop it) so we need to focus on spreading the peak out so we can deal with it. If we force people to make drastic changes too early (well before the peak) then when we actually need them to make those changes (just before the peak) they will be burnt out and won't do it nearly as effectively.
The peak is coming either way. Continuing to allow people to mix with each other as normal will make it steeper and more intense.
This article [0] makes the case well.
[0] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
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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.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... 80+ age category has a 21.9% death rate in confirmed cases.
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Something that is not much talked about is the fact that many people apparently die from a sepsis (bacterial) that is caused by the primary infection. 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%…
This is fascinating, I didn't know that data about antibiotic resistance was available like this, and definitely had no idea there was such huge variation between countries. Surely this should be considered a major public health emergency in itself? Are the countries with high percentages taking steps to limit antibiotic use? Coming from the UK the idea of letting people buy antibiotics as easily as painkillers seems…
Indeed. There's an episode of Sam Harris's podcast with Matt MCarthy from last summer. The episode title is The Plague Years, and they go into quite a bit of detail on this sort of thing and ruminate about how low on the radar it is for most people (if it even registers at all), despite the seriousness of the situation.
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?
There were HUGE discrepancies between those 2 sources of 'information', the quotes being added for the former case.
As such I have 100% certainty. I was validated later that night when despite our health minister claiming that 'we have it 100% under control' and our prime minister stating we were NOT going to be moving beyond 'stage 2' for now, a few hours later we moved to 'stage 3' and declared a national emergency.
Now for the speculation: Among those closer and more knowledgeable than me the rumor has it the health sector threatened the government to go public with the real state of affairs in the hospitals and in first line care if they would continue to refuse to take serious action.
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.
I'd like to hope, wishful thinking here, that there might be a trend towards requiring more scientific competence in our leaders going forward.
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#3 was to show what can happen in one hospital. These patients are hard to transfer. Lombardy is about 9200 sq mi. (about 100 miles square). If you need a ventilator you may not be able to withstand a 50 mile ambulance ride. But I concede I cannot offer conclusive proof that Italy is out of ventilators.
Lombardy started transferring intensive care patients to other regions a week ago: https://ilmanifesto.it/lombardia-paziente-trasferiti-fuori-r...
Note this is first time it's been triggered which indicates it's a difficult and risky process.
Article also notes "The people in charge of intensive care in Lombardy have sent a dramatic appeal to Governor Attilio Fontana: "Healthcare facilities are under greater pressure than any possibility of adequate response", the doctors write. "Despite the enormous commitment of all healthcare personnel and the deployment of all available tools, correct management of the phenomenon is now impossible."
This sounds like a system that's out of ICU beds.
see also https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763188 "As of March 8, critically ill patients (initially COVID-19–negative patients) have been transferred to receptive ICUs outside the region via a national coordinating emergency office."
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From my searches, they are currently at zero deaths? Low, at any rate. Feels like this supports my hypothesis. If anyone starts looking, they will find cases. Only if you have a baseline lung damage rate that is elevated will you see severe cases.
The first death in Norway was yesterday, an elderly person. I tried looking up some numbers on severe cases, but the Norwegian Institute of Public Health webpages are currently experiencing some DNS issues.
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South Korea traces the movement of everyone who tests positive, puts the movements online and tests those who were exposed to someone positive (this is in the article I believe). It's a massive effort but with the world economy at a stand-still, what else do people have to do? North Italy has a population of 27 people btw so the 10K that are registered as positive as a drop in the bucket.
I guess I'm lucky enough to know one of these 27 people.
"Why must I always explain" Bob Dylan
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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…
As posted else thread, the percentage of positive tests in Italy is almost 5 times larger than in Korea. This probably means that the infected population is much higher than what's being reported. 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 t…
Agree, is the logical thing. The bigger the sample, the better the results.
Another possible option could be that caucasian people is more susceptible for some reasons than asian people. The reasons could be genetic or cultural (i.e previous exposition to similar viruses by gastronomy). Without more data, I would take the first option as closer to truth.