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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

#701

Post by [deleted] »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #646
bonzini wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's special in that the Western world and their economies are much more interconnected and fragile than China or Iran, and South Korea was considered special due to the sect. It's also special in that they didn't have any experience with SARS. Besides Italy did start to apply lockdown measures to specific towns, and closed schools when they had 20 cases. It was insufficient but at least it was an attempt. The US has…

> It was insufficient but at least it was an attempt. And it should've been clear with all the data we had that it would be. Don't get me wrong, I don't think any of the other western countries does it right. Italy got unlucky because it was the first country where shit hit the fan. Might as well have been Germany if they wouldn't have gotten lucky in stopping the spread from their Bavaria case. But I fully stand by…

[deleted]

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#702

Post by bonzini »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #646
bonzini wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's special in that the Western world and their economies are much more interconnected and fragile than China or Iran, and South Korea was considered special due to the sect. It's also special in that they didn't have any experience with SARS. Besides Italy did start to apply lockdown measures to specific towns, and closed schools when they had 20 cases. It was insufficient but at least it was an attempt. The US has…

> It was insufficient but at least it was an attempt. And it should've been clear with all the data we had that it would be. Don't get me wrong, I don't think any of the other western countries does it right. Italy got unlucky because it was the first country where shit hit the fan. Might as well have been Germany if they wouldn't have gotten lucky in stopping the spread from their Bavaria case. But I fully stand by…

> But I fully stand by my point anyways that no country in the west did a good job

FWIW I totally agree.

> Might as well have been Germany if they wouldn't have gotten lucky in stopping the spread from their Bavaria case.

Yes, that's what Italy was hoping to do. They didn't realize how contagious this thing is.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#703

Post by [deleted] »

ghthor wrote: post #602
jiggawatts wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most people will not go to the hospital, they'll stay at home and they wont die unless they dont drink water and eat food with poor nutritional value. That's why I dont understand the crisis communication on the subject. I understand exponential growth, I dont under and the panic about getting sick with a flu like virus. If it was something causing skin lesions I'd be in panic mode because the victims would be at a h…

[deleted]

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#704

Post by rcxdude »

trashtester wrote: post #699
rcxdude wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fini…

Well, if I try hard to imagine how they think, without assuming incompetence, it would be as follows: Assumption 1: Our country will not be able to take measures that are extreme enough to stop exponential growth. Assumption 2: Once a certain level is reached, we can drastically lower the doubling time so that the number of simultanious cases are kept below what our healthcare system can handle. Assumption 3: If we s…

The growth will always be exponential. What you can change is the exponent. I don't think they are crazy for suggesting that extreme measures are unsustainable and their use should be timed correctly. I'm not completely sure they're right, but neither am I sure that extreme measures are right. Keeping a quarantine on a whole country up for 2 years seems unlikely. As I understand it, this plan hasn't just been hastily put together overnight, a team has spent a while researching and modelling outbreaks in preperation for just such a scenario, and as such I am inclined to trust them more than politicians (who are always happy to be seen to be doing something about a problem) and laypeople on the internet.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#705

Post by trashtester »

bsaul wrote: post #584
empath75 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It simply must be much more dangerous than the flu for the simple reason that comparatively few people have it and it is overwhelming hospitals.

i wonder if it's really true that "few people" have it. We do observe a huge amount of people going to the hospital in italy, but that could very well be because we reached the peak of the epidemie, where almost all of the population have been infected and remain asymptomatic. in this hypothesis, you implement a lockdown and see number drops over two week but what you're really seing is a population reaching herd imm…

When we are getting close to the peak of the epidemic, the growth will no longer be exponential, but close to linear. A logistic curve looks exponential for about the first 3rd, close to linear for the second third, and then approaching the asymptote with a negative exponential growth for the last third.

Increasing social distancing will naturally lower the exponential growth rate, but unless the growth becomes linear, there is no reason to believe that herd immunity is anywhere close.

In the asian countries, we more or less know that they have been able to contain the virus, instead of waiting for herd immunity. That meanst that they must have found most of the infected cases (or at least quaranteened them). This gives a good indication of how many deaths are caused by a given number of infected. The numbers are not different enough from Italy to think that more than (at most) a couple of hundred thousand in Italy have reached immunity. If so, it means that we have about 2 more orders of magnitude of growth before herd immunity can be reached. That would be hundreds of thousands of dead, if not millions, just in Italy.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#706

Post by trashtester »

rcxdude wrote: post #704
trashtester wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if I try hard to imagine how they think, without assuming incompetence, it would be as follows: Assumption 1: Our country will not be able to take measures that are extreme enough to stop exponential growth. Assumption 2: Once a certain level is reached, we can drastically lower the doubling time so that the number of simultanious cases are kept below what our healthcare system can handle. Assumption 3: If we s…

The growth will always be exponential. What you can change is the exponent. I don't think they are crazy for suggesting that extreme measures are unsustainable and their use should be timed correctly. I'm not completely sure they're right, but neither am I sure that extreme measures are right. Keeping a quarantine on a whole country up for 2 years seems unlikely. As I understand it, this plan hasn't just been hastily…

Growth does NOT have to be exponential (or at least not with any near-constant exponent). Furthermore, if the doubling rate is half a year or more, it really does not matter that much if it exponential, unless the number of already infected is already huge, since a vaccine is likely to come within 2 years.

From my perspective, it appears that politicians do NOT want to take sufficiently drastic measures, as the economic consequences will be huge (let's assume that Spain and Italy will keep or increase the measures they already have for 2 years), and so far, their measures do not seem to be sufficient.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#707

Post by irq11 »

cameldrv wrote: post #558
irq11 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drugs shown to be effective in vitro routinely fail to show similar effects in vivo . Chloroquines have a long history of this in viral studies.

The point is that according to what the official Chinese medical line is, it works in vivo. This is apparently confirmed by Korean experience. I understand the skepticism, but you go to war with the data you have, and the data we have indicates Chloroquine works.

The “data” is anecdotal, not even close to the standards of an effectiveness trial.

That said, it’s an approved drug, so it will be applied and we’ll see how it goes. But don’t spread rumors about its effectiveness, because the truth is, we don’t know.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#708

Post by TeMPOraL »

jamesrcole wrote: post #680
TeMPOraL wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't mean a non-specialist as in an average Joe; I meant an above-average Joe with some interest in one or more of: economy, physics, electronics, mathematics, biology. There's loads of such people.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#709

Post by sdkaufman »

joshstrange wrote: post #226

Chris Martenson likes to say "If the facts scare you, the problem isn't with the facts". (also check out his COVID-19 updates, I think they are very well done! [0]) You may think "it's not here yet". It is. You may think "the numbers are low". They aren't. We are failing miserably in our testing, our numbers are easily off by a factor of 10 (for infections). You might not want to be "weird" and not want to practice s…

> I don't say these things to whip people up in a panic, I say them because we are about to get hit hard here in the US.

The average person in the US rightly did not have much reason to be concerned a few weeks ago, but that's not the case anymore. It's important to understand that the situation has evolved rapidly for the worse here, and our response ("panic level" if you will) must escalate accordingly.

In particular:

- Each one of us is now at much higher risk of infection, possibly orders of magnitude higher than the official numbers suggest. The bungled testing rollout, the high level of community spread and the number of deaths together suggest the official numbers are grossly under-counting. [1] This is very different from a few weeks ago when the cases where mostly imported or had known transmission routes.

- A few weeks ago, the CDC was still hoping to contain the epidemic by tracing and quarantining cases. But that has changed. Whereas China, Hong Kong, Taiwan etc have succeeded in containing the disease so far, the US has already failed and the CDC now expects it to eventually spread to most of the US population. [2] Its strategy is now to slow it down enough to avoid what's happening in Italy.

- The situation in Italy has shown us the magnitude of human suffering that will result from people "under-panicking" and going about their daily lives at a similar stage of the epidemic. There will be a rapid explosion in cases, leading to a meltdown of the health care system. Many of us will lose our loved ones, and many of us will die unnecessary deaths from hospitals being overrun. Not to mention the impact on the economy, which we can't measure yet in Italy but could well be greater than the cost of locking down early.

So stop thinking "it's fine". It was a few weeks ago. It's not anymore.

[1] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summ... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cfYC4YLsu4

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#710

Post by joshstrange »

sdkaufman wrote: post #709
joshstrange wrote: post #226

Chris Martenson likes to say "If the facts scare you, the problem isn't with the facts". (also check out his COVID-19 updates, I think they are very well done! [0]) You may think "it's not here yet". It is. You may think "the numbers are low". They aren't. We are failing miserably in our testing, our numbers are easily off by a factor of 10 (for infections). You might not want to be "weird" and not want to practice s…

> I don't say these things to whip people up in a panic, I say them because we are about to get hit hard here in the US. The average person in the US rightly did not have much reason to be concerned a few weeks ago, but that's not the case anymore. It's important to understand that the situation has evolved rapidly for the worse here, and our response ("panic level" if you will) must escalate accordingly. In particul…

100% agree with what you are saying. I really meant more so that I don't want to encourage hoarding or panic buying to the level where other people can't get what they need. You should be worried, you should be preparing in anyway you can (2 weeks+ food, isolate yourself as much as possible, discourage gatherings of any size).
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