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

Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

left.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 740 posts

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#261

Post by jacquesm »

nullc wrote: post #216
lbeltrame wrote: post #36

As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus. It could do that because it could afford to take the economical hit and because it is an authoritarian state, which means you can get almost everyone to obey, in one way or another. Also, the Chinese Party is what caused this mess to begin with, by allowing this virus to spread all around the w…

> As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus. It could do that because it could afford to take the economical hit and because it is an authoritarian state, You know what is MUCH more effective than an authoritarian response? An _earlier response_. An earlier response, even if it weaker, is much more potent than a stronger later response.…

> You know what is MUCH more effective than an authoritarian response? An _earlier response_.

Absolutely. If this were Kerbal Space Program just about everybody would be able to tell you that the best moment to deflect an orbit is early on when you only need a little push for a giant effect later on. With exponential developments timing is everything.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#262

Post by incompatible »

greedo wrote: post #250
incompatible wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"China could afford to take the economical hit" The faster and better that you deal with it, the smaller the economic hit is going to be. China is going to be the big winner here.

Although China has a large internal market, they still rely on exports. If those are curtailed due to slackening demand, quarantine and tariffs, how do they become the "big winner?"

Well, smaller loser than they would have been if they'd allowed the virus to spread unchecked.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#263

Post by jiggawatts »

nostromo wrote: post #191
icedchai wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need expertise beyond elementary school math to understand cases doubling every 2 to 3 days is very, very bad. Look at the charts for any of the countries. They all follow the same pattern. The US is going to look like France and Italy in a week, 10 days at the most. This is a certainty.

> This is a certainty. Are you an epidemiologist?

"nostromo", can I ask you to just do something for me?

Open Excel. Or use a calculator and pen and paper.

Start with the known number of confirmed patients in . Or just "100" to use nice round numbers. Whatever. It doesn't matter that much.

Write out some rows like this:

    Date,       Cases
    2020-03-15, 100   -- today
    2020-03-20, 200
    2020-03-25, 400
    2020-03-30, 800
    ...
Each row is 5 days apart, which is the typical slowest doubling time in days. The cases double each row. Use a calculator if you need to.

Work out when you'll be at 10,000 cases and 1 million cases. Please. Just do it.

Now, you might think that is magically immune, that it's not populated with humans that have lungs, or that the weather will magically make the virus behave differently when it crosses your borders.

If you believe that, look at these graphs: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/03/coronavirus-i...

None of those countries are magically immune.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#264

Post by gpderetta »

FiberBundle wrote: post #116
wnkrshm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I don't see how trying to limit testing to people who had contact with known cases or traveled to at risk countries (as practiced in Germany) can be successful.

If the availability of testing kits is low and the ratio of infected to non infected people is extremely low, it makes absolutely no sense to sample randomly from the population.

Aldo if you expect the true positves to be a small percentage (which should still be the case in most countries), false positives will dominate in a ranom sampling. Apparently false positives are high for unsymptomatic cases. Of course if you can estimate the false positive rate well enough, the random sampling might still give useful statistics.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#265

Post by fma »

caseysoftware wrote: post #254
fma wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And where is Trump's response? We don't even have enough testing kits. We had 2 months to ramp things up.

The China travel ban went into effect 6 weeks ago. Italy, South Korea, and Japan followed not too long after. He was even called a dictator for that. Correction: South Korea & Japan were "do not travel" not specific travel bans.

Wait, I hope you are joking because you are spreading misinformation. Japan and Korea were NEVER banned. China was and Italy was just a few days ago.

Japan: level 2 (exercise caution) https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

Korea:level 3 (reconsider) https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#266

Post by devit »

jstanley wrote: post #165
lowdose wrote: post #114

Why didn't more people die in China?

Because Wuhan started welding people's doors shut as soon as they passed 400 new known cases in a single day. That kind of behaviour is not acceptable in the West (nor should it be, anywhere), but we still probably need to be taking this virus a bit more seriously than we are.

I think these claims of "this is not acceptable in the West" are absurd and one of the causes of the current catastrophe.

All you need is to pass a law and enforce it with police and military, it's not hard.

Since there is a good reason for the law, there won't be widespread resistance, and in fact on balance citizen are likely to help enforcement rather than hinder it.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#267

Post by solotronics »

jerf wrote: post #215
on_and_off wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear that the situation is already at that state in the USA. There are 1600 confirmed cases but the lack of tests hides how many real infections there are.

Like China, "the USA" is very large and probably not something that can be treated as an atomic entity. Even much-smaller Italy is probably too large for that. While there may be hot spots that develop in the US, I can tell you from personal experience that there states that have taken strong measures when there are still single-digit numbers of infected in them. The state I'm in is not in a mandatory full lockdown p…

I live in Dallas and two of my friends who work at hospitals both have multiple corona patients. It's everywhere, the official numbers are lying.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#268

Post by riquito »

troughway wrote: post #119
delegate wrote: post #46

I've seen comments here trying to play down the message or discredit the signatories of this letter. Don't. Please take it seriously. This is not sensationalism. What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I'm writing this from Barcelona, Spain. This last Sunday, 6 days ago, I went on a walk with my girlfriend, had a nice lunch, too…

>6 days later, we're at over 6000 infections, the country is in total lock down. Similar anecdote here. My SO texted me earlier this week saying how she will be taking the train from Madrid to Barcelona to go back to her family. She figured it will be empty on Sunday at 6 am. I have been following the situation evolve in Italy and told her to get on the train right away and leave immediately before it gets worse. Luc…

There's no "luckily". It's the exact behaviour that spread the virus all over Italy.

If you love your family and you have some sense of responsibility your duty is to stay where you are for a while. You can embrace your family in the near future.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#269

Post by marcosdumay »

wnkrshm wrote: post #58
bsaul wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's dealing with analytics data regularely, thank you ! i absolutely don't understand how can someone give any ratio about this disease knowing how only the most severe cases got tested ( except in SK), and that the symptoms are almost undistinguisable from the flu.

What do you think of the practice of only testing people who need hospital-level care and people who had contact with confirmed covid-19 patients (and people who traveled to at risk regions)? I would think that this can only give you the infected from a few clusters and you can be surprised by an unknown cluster of patients suddenly needing intensive care. Edit: And due to the long incubation period, that cluster can…

Testing the entire population is not viable. If you don't have many in-country cases, you can delay the epidemics arrival by controlling just the people that come from elsewhere.

Of course, after the disease starts propagating internally, testing becomes irrelevant, and it's time to reduce its spreading speed.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#270

Post by warent »

joe_the_user wrote: post #259
troughway wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>6 days later, we're at over 6000 infections, the country is in total lock down. Similar anecdote here. My SO texted me earlier this week saying how she will be taking the train from Madrid to Barcelona to go back to her family. She figured it will be empty on Sunday at 6 am. I have been following the situation evolve in Italy and told her to get on the train right away and leave immediately before it gets worse. Luc…

Shame on her People should stay where they are. Lockdown is not a disaster. People fleeing lockdown are literally the carriers of this disaster. Stay where you are, wait. Don't travel. Don't fight the locdown. Lockdown is the current, appropriate course of action. A very effective lockdown can eliminate the infection in, well, however long it took to eliminate it in Wuhan. Fleeing the lockdown now is just going to an…

I didn't see them say anything about "fleeing a lockdown." She was fleeing a potentially life-threatening virus in a scary situation in order to be with her family. That isn't so hard to grok, and obviously she felt she was making the right decision. Shaming someone for looking for security and safety in a scary situation (i.e. for being human) is just absurd.
Post reply on HN