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Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

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Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#421

Post by ModernMech »

arvinsim wrote: post #386
cercatrova wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political leadership being self serving while convincing people that they are not has been true throughout history, and will continue to do so in the future. There is no way to stop this without modifying human nature itself. I cannot blame the voting populace, yet at the same time, I cannot blame the politicians either. They are part of a larger system of incentives.

Then perhaps we need a better version of democracy. Or a better system of government altogether. I am hopeful that human civilization and ingenuity can invent or discover that. I am just not confident that it would be anytime soon.

The solution I think would be to somehow get people to lead who have no desire to do so. Politics attracts sociopaths and psychopaths due to the power involved. Competent and compassionate people have no time and patience for the power jockeying while sociopaths live for it. Thus you end up with a government by sociopaths for themselves. But how to make politics unappealing to sociopaths? Beats me.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#422

Post by xienze »

throw_564324 wrote: post #395
xienze wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re saying we should do the stuff that China did, starting from the decisive action part You do realize that some of their “decisive actions” included enforcing quarantine via welded-shut doors, right?[0] I don’t think you’re ready to handle the kind of “decisive action” that China took. 0: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818

They only did that to people that refused to self quarantine.

Well, I guess that makes it alright then.

I don’t think you understand the significance of welding the doors shut... it means if they catch you outside you can’t claim you did it on accident. So, wink wink, they’ll cure you of the virus permanently after that.

Again, you’re not ready for Chinese-style “decisive actions.”

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#423

Post by 7177Y »

GarrisonPrime wrote: post #7
spacephysics wrote: post #3

We don’t need military patrolling our streets just yet. Not saying it won’t come down to it, but the sentiment in the US is less, uh... flexible, towards being heavily locked down as compared to the aforementioned countries.

Or at least, some people would like to believe that. I suspect an astonishing large number of them will discover differently, should those ideals be put to the test. Just a hunch.

Much of the herd will comply. Many others will make their stand, especially with the current state of sentiment In the right wing population.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#424

Post by newtoday »

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…

'may be hot spots that develop in the US'

You're kidding right? Under what conditions that things are fine are you preposing? If you're not taking this serious, and in the US, you're definitely part of the problem. That attitude, statistics aside, is going to get people killed.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#425

Post by thedance »

ekianjo wrote: post #379
res0nat0r wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA is going to be in terrible shape very soon, just look at this as of tonight: https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113

Why are people still flying now? Most public transportation is rated as dangerous for several weeks already.

Why do people ever fly? Something like a quarter of people who travel by air contract a respiratory infection from doing so. It's an extremely effective way to spread disease.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#426

Post by 7177Y »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #240
mtmail wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advise from real experts is also to shut everything down.

No. It is to flatten the curve, i.e. to get infected slowly and manageably, in order to minimize peak ICU admissions. This will minimize deaths. If you fuck up initially, like China and Italy, by severely underestimating the problem, you're forced to shut down everything for a bit, but in the end everyone will be doing the same thing - shutting down some things to control the infection, not try in vain to "stop" it.

Best to shut down now and flatten as much as possible, no?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#427

Post by vl »

res0nat0r wrote: post #317
Taek wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No leader wants to take drastic action for their nation when the number of deaths they can point to for justification is smaller than the number of deaths for the seasonal flu. If they save lives and prevent the disease from spreading, it looks like they over-reacted and unnecessarily tanked the economy.

The USA is going to be in terrible shape very soon, just look at this as of tonight: https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113

Well, all these people consciously have chosen to fly at the time like this. It was clear that drastic travel disruption is imminent and chance of exposure is high on the plane, and yet they took the risk.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#428

Post by hatenberg »

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…

Really.

I mean sure - they dropped the ball on a new virus emerging from a familiar situation and getting blindsided by incompetent and image obsessed party officials who silenced the alarms and it took a while for the highly concentrated power structure of blindly loyal party officials to pivot and move.

However ...

It was not an unknown anymore for Europe There was months of warning time There is no suppression of scientific at scale There was daily warnings from WHO and many countries There was precedent for effective measures from Asia

There is no no no reason this should happen in a western democracy right.

And lets not even look at the US where image obsessed national officials with highly concentrated power and blind loyal party following have been actively downplaying (flu), suppressing the national response and hampering testing and effective containment.

It's like China in reverse - the stupid version playing out right in front of our eyes.

We all here love to repeat the virtues of western democracy over the autocratic China but right now we need to take a really good look at how much the theoretical ideals have been replaced by practices that combine the worst of both systems to absolutely devastating results.

If we don't want a major collapse down the road from all the other wait-and-see known threats, from antibiotic resistance to resource exhaustion to broken pension systems to climate change, we better start thinking about how we get of the 'reality is what we want it to be as long as we vote for people who tell us what we want to hear and cast out people who tell us what we need to act upon' train.

Darwin is about survival of the most adaptable to an ever changing world, not necessarily the strongest and right now China looks a lot more adaptable than we do- so if we like our values and system we better start making sacrifices to the gods of science and reality again.

That however would require us to even admit there is a problem and it's not looking promising

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#429

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

hatenberg wrote: post #323
jacquesm wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post-mortem (for want of a better term) on this will be pretty bad for some people in leadership positions. Assuming they survive. Very precious time was squandered with half-assed measures and uninformed decisions.

I don't share your optimism. We already seeing not acting recast as strategy. At least German politicians had the sense to step aside and hand the mess they made to the scientific experts to clean up.

The UK's moronic lack of response?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#430

Post by dboreham »

garmaine wrote: post #381
adinobro wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New viruses come out all the time. This viruses wasn't isolated as different till the end of December. The Doctor wasn't jailed ... The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market. Until we know where it started we don't know if it would have stopped the virus or not.

> The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market. The virus came from bats. The "wildlife market" in question sold raw bat meat. How else would it have gotten there?

Is this known for a fact? I thought the bat angle was more a most likely scenario but not proven.
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