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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

#561

Post by visarga »

xienze wrote: post #422
throw_564324 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

Don't worry about rights now, if you leave the door open and people walk about they will get even more decisive action from the virus, and gift the virus to others.

With the population it has, China could have been in a much much worse shape today were it not for the quarantine.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#562

Post by _y5hn »

Animats wrote: post #479
contravariant wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really matter, you're just doing that to make it easier to compare. Shifting South Korea so it doesn't overlap the other countries is possible but not terribly useful. They do seem to be missing Denmark though, which should stick out somewhere top-left of Norway.

They do seem to be missing Denmark though, which should stick out somewhere top-left of Norway. I was just talking, via text, to a friend in Norway. They're going for major restrictions on contact and the people there are not worried enough yet. I sent her that graph.

Norway is going into full lockdown (stay at home, don't hoard). Borders closing except for export/import from Monday. Hut vacations now getting banned as well.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#563

Post by rambojazz »

bengalister wrote: post #211

Here in France even with the Italian experience relayed in the press, i.e doctors having to make many times a day a choices between the ones who will live or die, many people don't take it seriously. I am shocked but not surprised by the behavior of my fellow citizens. Many people still went out shopping, went to the restaurants, still think it is a simple seasonal flu and do not at all comply with the recommendation…

> I am shocked but not surprised by the behavior of my fellow citizens. Many people still went out shopping, went to the restaurants, still think it is a simple seasonal flu and do not at all comply with the recommendations of avoiding contacts.

This is what happened in Italy as well. 1. people are recommended to stay the fuck home and reduce physical interactions 2. most people don't care and carry on with their normal life 3. state now needs to enforce harsh rules because people don't seem to understand that it's serious 4. some people still don't care, go to parks, beaches, private parties

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#564

Post by copperx »

cameldrv wrote: post #556
copperx wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chloroquine + Liponavir/Ritanovir may cause fatal arrithmias, in the case anyone out there is self medicating. It's one or the other.

Can you cite a source? Current Chinese treatment guidelines allow it. Also very important to quantify side effect risks, even if it's a rough estimate. For example, if a 70 year old patient has already progressed to dyspena, they might have something like a 20% mortality rate from COVID. Even if there is a side effect profile for the treatment that normally would be considered very dangerous, it may be well worth it…

I can't find the original source, but you can easily verify that both drugs increase the QT/QTC and PR interval, which is a high-risk interaction AFAIK (I'm not a doctor). Some doctors recommend doing an EKG before administering Chloroquine.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088394412...

What you're saying is true, but you're assuming that Chloroquine + Kaletra is better than Chloroquine by itself, and we don't have the data for that yet.

Do you have a source for the Chinese recommendations?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#565

Post by cmurf »

seganddr wrote: post #331
tcbawo wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state of Ohio has only 26 confirmed cases, but two days ago the Director of the Ohio Department of Health estimated that 1% of the state's population (100k) may be infected due to the high ratio of cases being community-spread [1]. This is the likely reason for such a high number of celebrities in the news testing positive -- it's already everywhere; they are the only ones getting tested. [1] https://www.wkyc.com…

That 100k number is for the whole world. It was a poorly worded tweet

She said it out loud. There's nothing confusing or ambiguous about it. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/top-ohio-health-offi...

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#566

Post by paganel »

kisna72 wrote: post #150
jbay808 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very important point if we're discussing the upsides and downsides of censorship, or whether China is a bad country and should feel bad about itself. But if we're looking for an example of how to solve the pandemic, when people point to China as an example, they aren't saying "we should spend a few weeks pretending the virus doesn't exist, threaten doctors who talk about it, order our labs not to study it, a…

exactly. I don't understand why people are so eager to assign blame when in reality every one would be better of taking the good parts of what China did.

We should assign blame to a drunk driver who hits someone, no matter if he became sober after the accident enough to drive his/her victims to the hospital.

There's certainly lots of blame to assign to China and after all this comes back to a "normal" state again the international community should pressure China into eliminating the things that made all this possible: they should be draconic in not allowing things like the Wuhan wet-market be open ever again, all over China, for ever, they should be forthcoming in allowing international experts come and asses things as soon as a new disease manifests itself, they should allow their local medical experts have the upper hand over local Communist officials, at all times.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#567

Post by toohotatopic »

tapland wrote: post #158
sorum wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italy isn't the worst case, they're just 2 weeks' ahead of most other countries. Looking at the latest SitRep from WHO, my home country (Sweden) has small no. infected (775), but grew 25% vs the previous day. If that rate keeps up, number of infected will keep on doubling every 4-5 days and in 14 days' time will be at what Italy is today (17k infected). And then another week later it'll break 100k. Exponential growth…

In Sweden we've avoided testing people who haven't been in high risk areas, and moved from that to only testing 'risk groups' (elderly and with preexisting conditions), so the numbers shouldn't be seen as reflective of the total number of infected.

Isn't Sweden itself a risk area? Looking at cases per 1M population [1], Sweden is at no 10, and its neighbors Norway and Denmark are at 2 and 6.

How come there are so many cases per capita? All the neighboring regions like Poland, Russia and even the North of Germany, have fewer cases.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#568

Post by dragontamer »

majos wrote: post #351
macintux wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know when to initiate or let up on the lockdown if we don’t have any testing?

A decline in cases to treat would be informative, no?

You're assuming that all cases are Coronavirus.

People will continue to get the Flu, Colds, HIV / AIDs even throughout this whole shebang. We need to know COVID19 cases specifically, to know if our lockdown methodology is being effective.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#569

Post by riffraff »

Animats wrote: post #170
TeMPOraL wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get how people - including apparently some governments - don't get or don't believe it. Getting this graph is as simple as 1) taking the daily measurements, and 2) plotting them on log scale (and technically 3) shifting the lines to overlap, but that's just cosmetics). The trajectory of the entire West being the same as Italy's is immediately apparent.

It's much worse than that. Italy's health system is already collapsing at 20,000 victims. The population of Italy is 60 million. That has to level off at some point due to saturation, but that's at somewhere in the millions or tens of millions.

FWIW, at the moment it's only lombardy's health system which is collapsing, because most of the victims are concentrated there and the growth rate there was _much_ faster because the lock down was only imposed late.

The growth rate is the same in other regions but delayed, and there is some hope that the rest of the country might be able to cope with it better if the lock down measures are effective.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#570

Post by bonzini »

MiroF wrote: post #523
zozbot234 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus. China dropped the ball for a full 10 days back when the disease was nicely contained to a small part of Wuhan, and then largely to Wuhan itself and Hubei - they didn't let the population know about the danger, so for quite some time no one was thinking about protecting themselves by wearing m…

I am not a huge defender of China, but it is disingenuous to claim that not realizing the import of the virus in the first 10 days is anywhere near the magnitude of the Italian government's failure.

The Italian government as the first Western country facing an outbreak was dealing with the prisoner's paradox. If you are the only one instituting strong lockdown measures you are the only one paying the economic price. It was wrong, but it's understandable that the government hoped that the infection could be contained to two clusters. The other European governments and the US on the other hand have absolutely no excuse.
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