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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

#161

Post by nostromo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #143
nostromo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we need more panic. Maximum panic please! For a disease that has a 0.5% fatality rate, and the medium death age is over the average life expectancy of one's country. And most scientists believe we can't stop it anyway. Yes, let's burn down the modern world and suspend all civil rights for this.

Something something 20% hospitalization rate * number of infected people >> healthcare capacity of any country -> a lot more than 0.5% of fatalities, + all the other deaths for all other kinds of medical emergencies, which only happen because doctors have to aggressively triage patients.

Obviously we should try and slow it down. But there's a fine line between slowing it down and overreacting.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#162

Post by csomar »

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.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#163

Post by zozbot234 »

scarmig wrote: post #129
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…

The full danger was unknown in the initial stages. Provincial officials were downplaying it for various reasons, and until the very end of December it wasn't known to even transmit person-to-person. Once the threat was clear, the government of China acted much more alacrity and decisiveness than any Western country, which have had months of advance notice.

"The very end of December" was 20+ days prior to the Wuhan lockdown, which was was essentially the only instance where China officially acknowledged the disease - before then, the local government was having police caution their doctors and scientists not to talk or "spread untrue rumors" about it. In the meantime, people in Wuhan and elsewhere were just hanging out as usual with no social distancing behaviors whatsoever. Not even wearing protective masks, which is a common habit there unlike the West.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#164

Post by jacquesm »

x__x wrote: post #81

This post does not feel like it rose naturally to the top of HN

My upvote was entirely natural. If you have proof of vote brigadeering you should send it to hn@ycombinator.com, speculation is pointless and against the guidelines.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#165

Post by jstanley »

lowdose wrote: post #114

Why didn't more people die in China?

Because Wuhan started welding people's doors shut as soon as they passed 400 new known cases in a single day.

That kind of behaviour is not acceptable in the West (nor should it be, anywhere), but we still probably need to be taking this virus a bit more seriously than we are.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#166

Post by __s »

thedance wrote: post #26
jakub_g wrote: post #5

> It’s hard for non-specialists to intuitively grasp the way an exponential rate increase can get out of control. The best way to explain the exponential growth (and shock people) is ask them about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

Or you could present them with the classic cognitive reflection question: A lake has one lily pad. Every day the number of lily pads doubles. After fifty days the lake is completely covered by lily pads. How many days did it take to cover half the lake with lily pads?

That's a big lake to have room for 1125899906842624 lily pads

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#167

Post by lbeltrame »

crazygringo wrote: post #88
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? Pretty much all countries have mechanisms for emergency powers. China being authoritarian has nothing to do with it. I'm not familiar with Italy's constitution or laws, but I assume it has similar provisions? > Also, the Chinese Party is what caused this mess to begin with, by allowing this virus to spread all around the world. Huh? On the one hand you're arguing China was too dra…

> What exactly do you suggest China ought to have done to prevent it from spreading outside of China?

Well, at the very least, take it seriously when there were the first reports of "new viral pneumonia" in Wuhan, instead of locking up or censoring people who reported that.

Yes, this doesn't mean that other countries did not take it as seriously as they should have, and perhaps containment might have failed nevertheless. Still, it was a spectacular failure with long-lasting consequences on every other country in the world.

That, IMO, deserves blame, no matter if other governments are doing the same errors.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#168

Post by TeMPOraL »

elorant wrote: post #141
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…

I had the same worries for Greece when in just two days recorded cases doubled from 100 to 200, but since the government imposed partial lockdown measures the rate of infections slowed down significantly. My guess is the same will happen everywhere. It's just that it's easier to see the growth slowing when you have an order of magnitude less incidents than Italy. We have to trust the process.

> but since the government imposed partial lockdown measures the rate of infections slowed down significantly.

They shouldn't have; what you're seeing is noise. There's a lag of roughly two weeks between when a person is infected and when they'll get caught by a test, so any benefits of the current lockdown will only be visible close to end of March.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#169

Post by cknoxrun »

jacquesm wrote: post #156
cknoxrun wrote: post #10

My co-founder and I are really struggling with the decisions ahead of us. We feel we should act quickly, and enforce our team to work from home, but the spread in our city is quite low for now. We also wonder how long this can go on, are we going to be isolated for months? We are at a critical point where we have just closed our seed round this past week. We have both put so much energy and time into this moment and…

I'm in the same position. More than a week ago I wrote an all-hands email to ensure that people realize that if they can work from home they should work from home and that we'd never force them to travel or be in the office if they do not want to and do not feel that it is in their best interest to do so. And of course it goes without saying that any indication of cold or flu like symptoms should cause someone to sta…

Our employees have always had the choice to work from home. Many just prefer to come to the office, no one has yet opted to work from home full time. The choice we were struggling with (until being shaken up in this thread), was whether to make it mandatory.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#170

Post by Animats »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #128
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 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.
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