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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

#651

Post by dependenttypes »

sdkaufman wrote: post #617
syshum wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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. Always makes me sad when Americans willing give up essential liberty to purchase perceived safety. Personally I would much rather look the situation rational, may the assessment of risk for myself, then choose on my own what course of action(s) I will take. Not have…

It's not just about your health or your life. This is what R0 means - even if you end up fine after getting the disease, you're going to transmit it to other people who may end up dying because of you. In other words, it's also your liberty vs other people's lives. Are you going to be the grandson who kills his grandma? Or the employee who kills the CEO? Or the Trump supporter who ends up helping elect Biden?

The grandma and the CEO can quarantine themselves at home if they so wish.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#652

Post by assblaster »

tantalor wrote: post #244
rosybox wrote: post #236

It's unlikely that other countries can do what China has done. As an example, China is able to do 200 CT scans a day at each fever station throughout the affected regions. In the US we can maybe do what 10 CT scans a day with a single machine? In China they were able to figure out within a short duration if someone needed to be quarantined. They built hospitals in days. It's not just about locking down. China has peo…

Do CT scans even help?

It's like artificially inflated GDP numbers from producing bad steel that nobody will buy. It does something, but in the end it's really nothing, and actually quite wasteful.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#653

Post by Symmetry »

dfox wrote: post #251
Animats wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the most useful graph on this subject so far. Go look at it now. Most countries have exactly the same growth trajectory measured from 100 cases. That's solid data about how this behaves. Singapore and Hong Kong have been able to slow things down by strong measures, but it's still a straight line on a log graph, just with 1/3 of the growth rate. Italy is on the same line, just 8 days ahead of Europe and 13 day…

I have one issue with or maybe just question about this graph. Why it starts with 100 detected cases? It seems like arbitrary round number, but it also seems to be the smallest arbitrary-looking number that makes SK overlap other countries. Why is that? Why is the initial slow spread in SK irrelevant? What caused it to be initially slower than in other countries?

People infected with the coronavirus tend to vary wildly in how many other people they infect from people who stay home with a fever and infect nobody to "super spreaders" who many infect hundreds of others. That means the spread rate when you don't have a statistically significant number of cases is going to be all over the map naturally and not really comparable.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#654

Post by rcxdude »

dragontamer wrote: post #568
majos wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For that you just need to test in hospitals.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#655

Post by rcxdude »

wnkrshm wrote: post #68
bsaul wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wish more countries did randomized testing over its whole population, or extensive testing, like SK.

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.

I think most places are switching from testing known contact/at risk countries to testing people in hospital with the symptoms. The first strategy makes sense if you're trying to contain a small number of cases, it doesn't make sense once people are catching it from other people in the area.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#656

Post by pettycashstash2 »

newtoday wrote: post #458
pettycashstash2 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I’m in New England tri state and started preparing 28 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339369

That's cause you're smart, and read hN!

I’d argue the smart part :) Well read is a better scarlet letter. Fairfield county, CT

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#657

Post by tialaramex »

fock wrote: post #621
zozbot234 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> authoritarian system that allowed them to build a hospital fast or close a city or whatever they did well on. Look, this is a dangerous meme in more ways than one. Italy and Spain managed to lock down entire cities, and those are countries with a strong tradition of democracy. Emergency powers, martial law etc. are a thing, and there's even quite a bit of precedent for using them to deal w/ disease outbreaks. Even…

well, Spain is still a monarchy (and has been since the caliphate was pushed back), had a Civil war, where fascists won and then ruled for 40 years... Then the king declared that he would like democracy more than autoritarian rule (without him). So much to a strong tradition of democracy...

Spain has a _constitutional monarch_ the same approach as the United Kingdom. This is actually a more stable choice than America's.

In constitutional monarchy the monarch is Head of State, a figurehead role with no real personal power. Because monarchs are born not elected this figurehead has no semblance of democratic legitimacy, it's obvious to everyone that they shouldn't get any power, yet as a symbol they are long-lived and emphasise continuity even as political change happens around them.

Elected Politicians on the other hand actually run the legislature and executive government.

That is, the laws you obey are made by people you elected to make them, but at times of crisis the living symbol of your country isn't some politician roughly half the country doesn't like.

This works so much better than the US system that Americans charged with trying to make new countries or fix broken ones (after "regime change" for example) do not follow the US model for many decades. If you're an optimist, the US model worked once and maybe they got lucky. If you're a pessimist we're just waiting for the cracks to get bad enough that it falls apart.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#658

Post by rcxdude »

jiggawatts wrote: post #230
mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

As a physicist, it still feels odd to me they are talking about statistics with such confidence here. It seems only SK has earned that right and has tested enough people to get reliable statistics. If you only measure the sick in the hospital...

So, as a physicist, you should know how exponential growth works. Let's say you have a pile of Uranium that's juuuust sub-critical. You would likely to be confident to stand next to it without significant fear. But if someone throws on just enough additional Uranium for the pile to go supercritical , you would run for your life because none of the following will matter[1] all that much to the final outcome: 1) How mu…

I think this insight is exactly why the UK health experts are not advocating extreme measures yet. They know they will only delay the takeoff and they need to use those measures when it does, not beforehand, and these measures are meant to protect the most at risk from dying from the disease (I think the most contentious thing is how long these measures can work for. The UK experts are of the opinion they have a finite life).

Keep in mind, the UK advisors think the peak is maybe two months away, and that at-risk groups may need to self-isolate for a month either side of that peak. This is a far bigger response than any country has achieved so far (and it's extra difficult because the at-risk groups are probably the most dependent on external aid, as well as already lacking social contact). I don't think they're wrong to think that this will be difficult to achieve, and increasing the difficulty by starting earlier will make things worse.

There is no SCRAM button on this pandemic, not any more at least.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#659

Post by adventured »

SZJX wrote: post #585
spectramax wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You lose credibility for the next time it is really needed" when I hear the government harrass NBA officials, gamers, non-citizens of the world when they criticize the CCP, going around banning movies and books left and right, never mind the extraordinary surveillance state it has built for its own citizens. I feel like the CCP has already lost its credibility when it can't have a spine and a composure, constantly f…

A quite black-and-white view to take when it's shown pretty well in this letter how the containment strategy they adopted apparently cut down the transmission a lot and potentially prevented many deaths. Would an alternative government that you propose do better in China? Very debatable. The world is not a good vs. evil story you know.

Most countries would not intentionally cover up serious outbreaks like this, much less do it twice (as previously with SARS).

They wouldn't threaten and silence numerous doctors that tried to warn everyone.

They wouldn't blockade access to one of the world's largest cities, to prevent outside health inspectors from assessing what was really going on. It wasn't until the first week of February that they were willing to let a major contingent of outside experts in, including from the US. That was two months into the outbreak and a point where things had already gotten very bad.

If this had started in France and the US asked to send experts in to help, France would not deny that request, they wouldn't blockade Paris off from all foreign access to hide what was really happening (how bad it was, and what they were doing to people).

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#660

Post by gpderetta »

georgemcbay wrote: post #185
garmaine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China dropped the ball for a full 10 days back when the disease was nicely contained to a small part of Wuhan... Uh, China dropped the ball for a full 3 months since the first reports of a novel respiratory disease started back in November . First denying it, then jailing the doctors who tried to raise the alarm. Not to mention not enforcing their own laws regarding food hygiene put in place after SARS which would…

None of that is really the point though. The point is that so many other countries are dropping the ball in the same (or worse!) ways than China did after having the luxury of seeing what happened in China. If you have 3 people and one slips on a patch of ice and falls you could argue they should understand how ice works and should have been more careful, but if you have 2 other people see that person fall and they b…

Maybe the best solution would be to get rid of the patch of ice instead of finding someone to blame, while people keep slipping over it.
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