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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

#531

Post by emmelaich »

Retric wrote: post #418
nostrademons wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, hospital-level serious for 20% of cases. 5-10% require ICU care. The ~2% fatality rate is with ICU support and ventilation. When the hospitals get overrun it increases to ~7%, which is what we saw in Wuhan and now Italy. Your chance of dying if you do need hospitalization but don't get it appears to be > 50%. Death rates by age range also assume ICU care. It's virtually unheard of for healthy middle-aged people…

It’s far from clear how accurate those numbers for Italy and China are. China essentially gave up on testing the general population in Wuhan and their numbers mostly represent the most serious cases. Italy’s infections seem to be mostly centered around the elderly with 40% of infections in the 70+ age range despite 65+ year olds only representing 21.53% of their population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavi…

Populations of China and Italy are ageing and have a lot of smokers.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#532

Post by adrianN »

NullPrefix wrote: post #517
adrianN wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For a while" is likely until we have a vaccine and produced enough of it to build up herd immunity. That probably takes a year or more.

Is it worse than catching the virus during your trip and bringing it to the family?

No, but for some people it might be worse if you also take into account the probability of catching the virus at this stage. Even in the worst-affected areas at most single-digit percentages of the population have the virus.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#533

Post by bryanrasmussen »

chongli wrote: post #384
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by intuitively I suppose you mean feel it, which I guess is true, but it does not take a genius to actually understand the concept, especially if it is explained as right now you will get this many people per day, in a week you will get this many, in a month this many. That is pretty easy, a politician should be able to follow it. But as has been pointed out before most people think if you do something big and dramat…

One way to test this is to ask random people the question: "The number of lily pads on a pond double every day. If it takes 20 days for the lily pads to completely cover the pond, how long does it take to cover half the pond?" I think you will be surprised by how many people say "10 days."

I agreed that people did not understand exponential growth, but I pointed out that "but it does not take a genius to actually understand the concept, especially if it is explained as right now you will get this many people per day, in a week you will get this many, in a month this many."

So if you explain to the politician, once you start getting cases in your country and give them the actual growth rates, and what slowing down the growth rates will mean, with nifty charts and so forth.

Like maybe they should do in the movie Outbreak where they have display of the red spreading across the country on its way to the White House, with a timeline animated below it, then the politician will understand the situation without intuitively understanding exponential growth.

I suppose reasonably competent data visualizers who have ever had to explain complicated things to non-technical people in an important meeting would know how to represent the concept in their particular domain without much problems.

on edit: changed our to your

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#534

Post by jopsen »

incompatible wrote: post #90
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…

"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.

I don't see any reason to think that China can better handle the economic hit.

China has more poor people than Italy, it stands to reason they are less well equipped to handle an economic down turn.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#535

Post by mraudiobook_com »

sjy wrote: post #504
iagovar wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish lead epidemiologist was telling us a few weeks ago that nothing was going to happen here. I did my numbers back in December. In January was already pretty worried, but I'm not an expert I thought. Maybe there's something I'm not taking in account. So I kept reading about models and stats. Not that difficult. Ran my numbers again and again, yep it seemed pretty bad no matter what I cheated myself with paramete…

What “numbers” were you doing back in December? The virus had not spread outside of Wuhan, or been named or sequenced, by that point.

Sounds like a Spanish Greg Maxwell.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#536

Post by sdkaufman »

moriturius wrote: post #513
hatenberg wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February. We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored. Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it. Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and socc…

This post is exactly the essence of why I don't like politics. It's super easy to retrospectively say "they should've done something else". You might think that even you would do the right choice, but you are wrong. Such decision is hard for any authority. You may vote for any person in the whole world and the result would probably be similar. Lockdown delivered too early could send whole country into chaos. Also Chi…

> saying retrospectively "you should've known better" is just childish

European governments were not the first to have to deal with the epidemic (China), nor among the first few (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore etc.). They were fully aware of what happened in Wuhan without early action. They literally just had to follow what Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea etc were all doing. Those countries had less information and less time to act, and yet they're riding this much better than much of Europe.

So why _shouldn't_ European governments have known better?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#537

Post by mtsr »

sneak wrote: post #469
fattire wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside the fact that here in the US tests are literally not happening on an epic scale that will be the subject of numerous investigations, hearings (, and prosecutions?) in the years to come. And forget that even if we had legit numbers, those numbers we can see are a tip of the iceberg, representing at most 20% of the actual more-serious cases. Put that all aside. Remember-- the numbers we see now are a look…

I have been telling a lot of my friends this, but many are scheduled to work on Monday (most in public-interacting roles) and if they don't go to work, they lose their job and can't make rent next month. This is a real issue, and I have no solutions. The only thing I've been saying to them is that all bars and restaurants will be closed here in 2-3 weeks and that their bosses will understand then. They are understand…

This is not going to be over in April or May, except maybe in the worst case scenario. The point of social distancing etc is flattening the curve and spreading the load on healthcare systems over a longer time.

The only thing that might help there is if warmer weather reduces the spread. But then it could very well come back in the fall.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#538

Post by freepor »

irq11 wrote: post #466
freepor wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are basically two paths: act swiftly and decisively at the very beginning. Immediately close your borders. Find the infected and contact trace them. Dragnet test where necessary. Haul off the sick to quarantine locations run by the government. etc. Then you don't need to lock down the entire country. Path 2 is you fuck it up and Covid-19 is running rampant through your entire population. Of course at this point…

This is a false dichotomy. There is no particular reason to believe that China’s approach is the only correct path, other than it’s the one they used.

China was certainly not an example of the first. They tried to cover up its existence in the beginning! The best examples are Japan and Singapore.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#539

Post by friedman23 »

droithomme wrote: post #464
friedman23 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The math was very clear by early/mid February The leaders of the country, the people in power, and the populace are not math literate.

The leaders all have math literate advisors. They ignore them for a variety of reasons.

Politicians only listen to experts when it is politically convenient.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#540

Post by [deleted] »

zapita wrote: post #287
nostromo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two sides of that coin. One side: it's much more widespread than we realize. Other side: it's much more mild and less fatal than we first thought.

You’re assuming all deaths caused by Coronavirus are correctly identified as such. Sadly that’s almost guaranteed to not be the case.

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