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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

#591

Post by lbeltrame »

adrianN wrote: post #509
lbeltrame wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quarantining is the only thing that will help in this situation. The question is, for how long? Until the infection curve goes down? Until there is not a single infected cases in the whole country? While you can't know when this will happen (especially the former, most models are inaccurate because too little is still known about this virus), I don't believe it is sustainable to keep an extended lockdown on a whole…

Until we have a vaccine or enough people have been infected to build up natural herd immunity. At least a year is my guess.

I don't know if the country can hold economically and socially being completely locked up for one year. Probably not.

And I'm not sure if people can hold psychologically being locked up for one year.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#592

Post by lbeltrame »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #387
cameldrv wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China’s fatality rate is also way down. Partly of course from less stress on the medical system, but they’ve also just learned a lot about how to treat it, particularly what drugs to use. I believe Chloroquine + Liponavir/Ritanovir + Interferon or Ribavirin is state of the art.

I thought that remdesivir was the drug showing the most promise? What happened with that one? And my big questions are how soon can they spool up world supplying levels of batches?

It's being tested in a few trials, the earliest one should have data in April, IIRC.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#593

Post by zhte415 »

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #560
zhte415 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lancet unverified those numbers quite a while ago https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I flagged this because it was published in January nearly a month earlier than the WHO's verification. Essentially this was not in bad faith when it was published but it is now so out of date and misleading and sharing it now is dangerous in that it may cause people to ignore safety advice.

It was a nowcast. It's intended to be out of date after a while. And provide an estimation at the time. I don't understand how it is dangerous, could you explain that?... earlier action would have been better.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#594

Post by WA »

nostrademons wrote: post #499
nemonemo wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much difference is there between the r0 value of 2 and that of 3? Maybe we can't flatten the curve to fit it under the threshold, but we can probably reduce the area above it?

Trevor Bedford had a tweet that indicated a 25% reduction in social contacts results in a 50% reduction in cases after 1 month: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1237934525281259521 I think it's very likely that Wuhan or Italy style lockdowns will bring r0 under 1, based on the experience in Wuhan and Italy. That means the disease eventually dies out. Because it's endemic elsewhere in the world, it'll eventually be re…

- For how long do you have to keep your containment measures up?

- Do you have to introduce new containment measures with every wave of reinfection?

- How many waves / months of total are required to achieve enough herd immunity while keeping the hospitals within capacity?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#595

Post by antpls »

sdkaufman wrote: post #575
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…

> Why on Earth is this a good model? Because it worked. Millions of lives have been saved - 1% of 1.3B is 13M people. That's 1/5 of Italy. Are there better models? Maybe. But there are also much worse models, as I suspect we might soon find out in the US [1]. Personally I'd much rather take the Chinese model for the next few months than risk me and my family dying or going bankrupt over the next few months. And, inst…

> Because it worked. Millions of lives have been saved - 1% of 1.3B is 13M people. That's 1/5 of Italy.

This is an inacurrate estimation. I guess your figure of 1% is from South Korea case fatality rate. The confirmed cases represent a biased sample of the population, and the mortality rate could be lower in reality (but not higher).

> consider the economic impact of 13M people suddenly dying.

The mortality is mainly for 70+ years old people, who are already not in the workforce anymore.

Those numbers cannot help us to evaluate or to compare one state's measure versus another state's decision

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#596

Post by hanspeter »

toohotatopic wrote: post #567
tapland wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Likely because we travel more and have more tourists in the Nordic.

For Denmark we actually seeded our Corona spread by bringing home hundreds of infected (it turned out) from ski vacation in Italy and Austria (265 from Austria alone) and not putting them in quarantine.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#597

Post by simonh »

zozbot234 wrote: post #80
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. 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…

The containment situation in Wuhan in the early stages cannot be compared to the situation in European countries or the US now, or even the situation in Wuhan now

In the early stages in Wuhan the virus only existed in Wuhan. A severe lockdown that eliminated the virus there would have eliminated it completely. Full stop. It would have been gone forever.

A draconian lockdown right now in e.g. the UK, or even a few weeks ago, might have eliminated the virus in the UK, but then it would just come back in again. We can’t seal the entire country permanently.

Even in Wuhan, they are easing the lockdown so soon the virus will get back into Wuhan again. It’s just a matter of time before they have another outbreak. It’s simply impossible that it won’t happen.

Lockdowns are important tools to slow the spread of the virus, they are a vital part of our response, but they can only slow it down. They cannot stop it or eliminate it. Also lockdowns are most effective the first time you do them, and then they’re the most effective in the first few weeks.

Impose a heavy lockdown too soon, and it’s like using up your most powerful ammunition before the enemy is in effective range of your weapons. Letting the enemy get closer might mean accepting casualties early on, but fewer casualties overall and a better chance of victory. It’s a hard, painful choice to have to take.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#598

Post by lmz »

pmontra wrote: post #573
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.

Especially because they are in the position to help other countries now, when everybody else have to think only about their own citizens. They sent doctors to Italy with medical equipment (Italy sent some help to China earlier on) so they're going to take some credit for the recovery. Then there will be the real recovery. Western Europe was rebuilt with US money after WW2 and the USA consolidated an hegemony which is…

Maybe China will emerge as the winner because they kept the number of victims down, just like the US emerged as the winner of WW2 after its industry was spared destruction by bombing.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#599

Post by thepra »

From Italy, don't trust the Italian media, they are the first that are making so much fuss and wrecking chaos, and especially making quite some money because as an industry it was starving for some time.

Statics say clearly what strategy could have been followed to take care of coronavirus without much disruption of the working force. And the people at the government are mostly old farts, which says quite a lot why they panic.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#600

Post by datastoat »

csomar wrote: post #162
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…

> Why on Earth is this a good model? It's not but I guess it's the best they have right now. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore are still functioning and have "contained" the virus. The number of cases/deaths did not explode despite contracting the virus much earlier.

It's good you put "contained" in quotes. Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong are all (according to this plot [0]) showing exponential growth in the number of cases. It's a slower exponential than elsewhere, but it's still an exponential.

[0] https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

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