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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

#671

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #175
Animats wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worse still, Italy has one of the better healthcare systems. This doesn't bode well for the rest of Europe.

Well Lombardy does (number 2 in the regions of the EU). I believe that some Italian commentators have said that one of the biggest reasons for the total country lockdown was that the health systems of Southern Italy were much much worse than Lombardy, and would definitely not be able to cope.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#672

Post by c789a123 »

gpderetta wrote: post #661
c789a123 wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHO? Italy lockdown its cities on Mar 9, and WHO declares wuhan virus pandemic on Mar 11. Before that, WHO discourages country to take effective measures and cut out traffic with China. Luckily, not all countries are fooled by this idiotic org and take its own measures. Taiwan, who is not even a member of WHO, took good measures and protected itself. Unfortunately Italy and other European countries are fooled and cut…

Italy was one of the first countries to cut down traffic from China months ago. Didn't do any good.

Where you got that info? Any link?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#673

Post by Yetanfou »

lawn wrote: post #650
Yetanfou wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden, like the UK and possibly the Netherlands has chosen to let the disease spread among the population to achieve what they call "herd immunity" [1 - Swedish]. There might be some truth to the herd immunity thought, the problem is they don't have any control over the speed at which the infection will spread through society. Eventually everyone who can be infected will get infected no matter what is done so that h…

Note that it's only the opinion of someone that Sweden is following the "herd immunity" strategy, and it's denied by several officials. Sweden hasn't closed down schools etc like other countries have done so it's fair to argue that it's being done in practice, but it doesn't seem to be a conscious decision.

Statsepidemiolog Anders Tegnell säger att resonemanget om flockimmunitet ”delvis” stämmer, men att det inte är myndighetens strategi. – Vårt huvudsyfte nu är att få smittspridningen att gå så långsamt som möjligt.

...which translates to...

State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell says the reasoning around herd immunity is partly correct but that it is not the organisation's strategy - our main goal now is to get the infection to spread as slow as possible

...but the Swedish government is not actually doing much to limit the spread of the disease other than telling people who show symptoms to stay at home. By now it has mostly been proven that infected people spread the infection for a few days before they show symptoms and the fact that children can be and often seem to be asymptomatic carriers the spread will be rapid and result in a large number of people in need of medical care. The Swedish health care system was already overloaded before the pandemic so it will not be able to handle a large number of patients in need of critical care. The same scenario is now playing out in Italy so this should not come as a surprise.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#674

Post by psychlops »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #667
psychlops wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a quote from the first link you have: "That means the total number of reported cases is very likely an underestimate—and by not counting many mild or asymptomatic cases, we’re likely overestimating the disease’s overall mortality rate." It is not possible to know the mortality rate with the information we have. Extrapolating that dubious number into a prediction of deaths is not a meaningful exercise.

To be fair, they are using 1% which is an underestimate given what we know right now. In general, with exponential growth the best time to act was yesterday.

The only reliable number are deaths assuming people aren't hiding (or burning) the bodies. The number of tests are reliable among themselves, but we can't necessarily compare specificity and sensitivity of the tests against each other. Maybe those numbers are out there, but i haven't seen them.

The amount of infected is not and will not ever be known and it's a dark time for statistics when many are taking the non-randomly tested and dividing by fatalities and projecting deaths on large populations.

Exponential growth is how successful infections progress. There is nothing new to see here. This sort of aggressive strain was easily foreseeable years ago and we rely on strategic, planned measures to be executed by government.

Random, localized shutdowns only serve to exacerbate the unwarranted panic we are now seeing. The time to think was years in the coming, the actions now display an enormous failure in leadership.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#675

Post by Frost1x »

VladimirGolovin wrote: post #515
jamesrcole wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In part, because they think they already understand the situation, and the nature of that understanding precludes taking things like that seriously. “It’s just the flu” “It only kills 2% of people” “The flu, cancer, car accidents, malnutrition, etc have killed far more people” “People were worried about SARS, Swine Flu, and H1N1, and they turned out to be hardly kill anyone.” “There number of cases here is small. Why…

> I imagine that most people aren’t aware of the graphs. And even if they are, they aren't aware of log scale.

Definitely. Noticing it's log scale (or anything non-linear) takes a trained eye.

I've worked with, presented, and consumed a lot of scientific data over my career and I still have a tendency to assume plots are linear no matter how many times I tell myself to always check scale first.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#676

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dmitriy_ko wrote: post #467
ModernMech wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are enough honest, intelligent scientifically-minded people who want to be government leaders. They don't get elected. Current political system favors demagogues.

The trouble is that these people need to compete against a subset of people who want power more than anything else. These honest people decide it's not worth it, and get selected against and never make it to a position where they can affect change.

Alternatively, they do, and the process of getting there makes them less likely to do the things they wanted to do.

Bring back sortition!

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#677

Post by tialaramex »

adventured wrote: post #663
tialaramex wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

> This is actually a more stable choice than America's. You can't support that claim. Historically - all of recorded history - there are less than half a dozen examples that can be argued to be comparable to or to have systems that are more stable than the US over two centuries of time. Go ahead and list all the constitutional + democratic systems that have lasted for more than two centuries. The European region bare…

So what you've done there is a very common mistake. The US was not the only country built with this approach, it's just the only time it has worked (so far).

Plenty of countries especially in Latin America copied this choice and it didn't work for them. I think the evidence supports the conclusion that's because it's a bad choice.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#678

Post by TeMPOraL »

Frost1x wrote: post #675
VladimirGolovin wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I imagine that most people aren’t aware of the graphs. And even if they are, they aren't aware of log scale.

Definitely. Noticing it's log scale (or anything non-linear) takes a trained eye. I've worked with, presented, and consumed a lot of scientific data over my career and I still have a tendency to assume plots are linear no matter how many times I tell myself to always check scale first.

Any half-decent plot aimed at non-specialists will have "log scale" written in the title or surrounding description. The one linked by 'soVeryTired didn't, which is where FT dropped the ball. But it does not matter here.

The relevant axis on this chart is the time axis, the x axis. The chart is linear in it. You see a bunch of nearly identical trend lines, and you have to just count how many days a given country is behind Italy. It doesn't matter what scale the vertical axis is in.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#679

Post by trashtester »

ufov2 wrote: post #139
trashtester wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a physicist, you are familiar with formulas similar to this: N_obs = p_detect * 2^( n_days / T_double ) N_obs : The number of observed cases p_detect : The fraction of actual cases that are detected (assumed to be constant) n_days : number of days T_double : The number of days it takes for the number of real cases to double If you examine the formula, the p_detect constant is almost insignificant. If T_double = 2,…

That assumes you are sampling uniformly, and not in already saturated clusters. The doubling time is also not a known constant, as it depends on actions taken etc, and uncertainty in it will broaden the distribution. Obviously, all this is basic statistics and should be known to epiodemiologists, who hopefully have some input to policies. For large N_obs, this will maybe be less important as you're going to find the…

As long as growth remains linear in an exponential plot, you are nowhere near the saturation point. When about half the population is already infected, the number of new cases should grow roughly linearly. In Italy, it seems to still grow exponentially.

Itally has already passed the number of simultanous cases that their healthcare system can handle. I don't believe they really want to find out at what level the saturation point can be found. That could mean hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, dead.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#680

Post by jamesrcole »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #678
Frost1x wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. Noticing it's log scale (or anything non-linear) takes a trained eye. I've worked with, presented, and consumed a lot of scientific data over my career and I still have a tendency to assume plots are linear no matter how many times I tell myself to always check scale first.

Any half-decent plot aimed at non-specialists will have "log scale" written in the title or surrounding description. The one linked by 'soVeryTired didn't, which is where FT dropped the ball. But it does not matter here . The relevant axis on this chart is the time axis, the x axis. The chart is linear in it. You see a bunch of nearly identical trend lines, and you have to just count how many days a given country is…

> Any half-decent plot aimed at non-specialists will have "log scale" written in the title or surrounding description

I have to wonder how many non-specialists would even know what “log scale” means.

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