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Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

reuters.com

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Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#221

Post by enitihas »

FriendlyNormie wrote: post #193
Fnoord wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will they affect the next corona virus or other pandemic though? They'll be able to see "COVID-19 was a joke, this one will be too".

You do understand that everything would have been fine if we simply pretended this virus didn’t exist, right? A few extremely old people would have died slightly sooner. That’s it.

No, that is totally wrong. The medical system would collapse. See what is happening in Italy. Most of the critical cases require ICU. There aren't enough ventilators if everyone gets infected. And without proper care, not just old but even young people may face huge problems.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#222

Post by toolz »

spac wrote: post #199
toolz wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick google suggests around 15% of hospital beds are ICU and covid 19 cases that end up in the hospital, only 5% end up in ICU. So that's an interesting line of thinking but it lacks supporting evidence that covid 19 is overwhelming ICU. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032 edit to address your edit: The mortality rate is often wildly inflated with new diseases. That's because most people don't seem…

The ICU beds are also taken by all the other sick people. Only a minority is actually free. And people don’t end up in the ICU because they panic: I spoke to several Italian hospital doctors and they are overwhelmed by the troves of patients who can’t breathe .

I just read an article that claimed Lombardy has 737 ICU beds available for covid 19. Given Italy has a 3.18 beds per 1000 people that means they have less than 3% of their hospital beds available for covid 19 patients. That's absurd. In relation the USA has roughly 14% of their beds as ICU beds according to a reference from https://www.sccm.org/Communications/Critical-Care-Statistics

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#223

Post by kaitai »

toolz wrote: post #175
adventured wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your 10% premise is wrong because you're conflating intensive care capacity and regular hospital beds. You can't just put Covid patients in with the general hospital population and it isn't trivial to convert other hospital beds to the requirements of Covid while ensuring you keep everyone else in the hospital safe from infection. Lombardy does not have anywhere near enough intensive care capacity to handle the cases…

A quick google suggests around 15% of hospital beds are ICU and covid 19 cases that end up in the hospital, only 5% end up in ICU. So that's an interesting line of thinking but it lacks supporting evidence that covid 19 is overwhelming ICU. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032 edit to address your edit: The mortality rate is often wildly inflated with new diseases. That's because most people don't seem…

Percentage of ICU beds varies widely. Minnesota, for instance, a state in the US, has about 500 ICU beds [1] and over 10,000 hospital beds total [2]. ICU beds are already heavily used and sometimes there simply are not enough, before COVID-19 has even shown up. Average inpatient stays right now are 4.21 days in Minnesota [3]; I can't find a reliable number for length of stay for COVID-19 patients, but it is longer.

There is plenty of evidence that in Italy COVID-19 has overwhelmed ICU beds. They are trying to transport people to ventilators via helicopter. We do have at least twice the ICU bed capacity in the US (compare info from [4], [5]). But many other people need these ICU beds -- it's not like other illnesses will just stop for our convenience.

[1] https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/03/08/talking-points-pre... [2] https://www.ahd.com/states/hospital_MN.html [3] https://www.mnhospitals.org/mn-hospitals/quick-facts [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4351597/ [5] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00134-012-2627-8

Edited to add: remember, included in most totals of ICU beds are neonatal and pediatric ICU beds, which won't help much with COVID-19.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#224

Post by taeric »

neuronic wrote: post #192
taeric wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part of Italy hit also has air quality, per aqi searches, that is comparable to the region in China that was hit hard. Have people looked that it is not age, but baseline damage to your lungs that is the main factor in serious cases? Older people will have more exposure to local air pollution, just from having lived longer. That existing damage can be what contributes to complications, right?

I wonder if and how long-term smokers are skewing the stats.

That hinges a lot on if I'm right. Which is still unlikely, as much as I'm find of my own opinions. :)

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#225

Post by dragonwriter »

FriendlyNormie wrote: post #193
Fnoord wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will they affect the next corona virus or other pandemic though? They'll be able to see "COVID-19 was a joke, this one will be too".

You do understand that everything would have been fine if we simply pretended this virus didn’t exist, right? A few extremely old people would have died slightly sooner. That’s it.

Wrong. The short explanation is the chart on this page: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/science/coronavirus-curve...

And that's not even addressing that the at-risk group isn't just the old.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#226

Post by irq11 »

ihaveajob wrote: post #46
dsjoerg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last line is the super important point, occurred to me today as well. If we beat this thing with social distancing, idiots will say "See! There was no reason to panic!"

Indeed. Just 2 days ago I was talking to someone who was annoyed by people taking measures: "See, in China they're already seeing infections going down! No point in taking all these measures!" Without apparently realizing the reason why they're going down is extreme is precisely those extreme measures.

There’s not much evidence that the extreme “lockdown” decisions made by China had a significant impact on the outcome either way.

Social distancing, contact tracing and isolation of the sick work well, and that was almost certainly the critical portion of the response.

For example, this paper makes a solid argument that the travel ban delayed the epidemic across china by only a few days:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/05/scie...

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#227

Post by gpderetta »

joe_the_user wrote: post #125
Retric wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large number of South Korea infections are even younger due to how it spread. Italy: Above 80: 1,532 (18.4)% vs age 20-29: 296 (0.0)% South Korea: Above 80: 243 (3.1)% age 20-29: 2,261 (28.7)% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I... Of note, neither country has had anyone under 30 die. Deaths in the 80+ age range are 8.23% in So…

A large number of South Korea infections are even younger due to how it spread. Another possibility is that Italy doesn't have a handle on who is or isn't infected so what they report are the obvious infections, who tend to be older.

It is possible you are right. IIRC, 17% of those tested were positive in Italy. That's a very high percentage. Very likely the actual infected number is much higher.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#228

Post by maxerickson »

ivanhoe wrote: post #204
tomerico wrote: post #10

Italy has an older population, hence more susceptible to deaths and spreading of the virus: - Average age of death due to Coronavirus in Italy is 82 [1] - In Italy, 3.65% of the population is 80 or older [2]. - In Korea, 1.75% of the population is 80 or older [3] [1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/covid-19... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2019/ [3] https://www.populationpyramid.net/…

There are also cultural differences, Italians like to hang out in groups, outside, personal space is much smaller, people hug and kiss and touch all the time. Also they're not really the most disciplined nation, lots of them simply ignored the safety rules, continued to go out, there were even some cases where infected people run away from quarantine. And additionally the spread of virus is not uniform as it depends…

Did they infect 1000 people, or were they the index case for a group of 1000?

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#229

Post by kaitai »

spac wrote: post #199
toolz wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick google suggests around 15% of hospital beds are ICU and covid 19 cases that end up in the hospital, only 5% end up in ICU. So that's an interesting line of thinking but it lacks supporting evidence that covid 19 is overwhelming ICU. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032 edit to address your edit: The mortality rate is often wildly inflated with new diseases. That's because most people don't seem…

The ICU beds are also taken by all the other sick people. Only a minority is actually free. And people don’t end up in the ICU because they panic: I spoke to several Italian hospital doctors and they are overwhelmed by the troves of patients who can’t breathe .

Right: we do have those ICU beds because people are in them.

Toolz, I just don't understand your math. You seem to assume that a neonatal ICU bed is just as good for a 55-year-old man as an adult one, and that no one is going to have any other ICU-needing illnesses for the duration of this epidemic. That's quite puzzling. Can you support these ideas?

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#230

Post by UberMouse »

maxerickson wrote: post #228
ivanhoe wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also cultural differences, Italians like to hang out in groups, outside, personal space is much smaller, people hug and kiss and touch all the time. Also they're not really the most disciplined nation, lots of them simply ignored the safety rules, continued to go out, there were even some cases where infected people run away from quarantine. And additionally the spread of virus is not uniform as it depends…

Did they infect 1000 people, or were they the index case for a group of 1000?

They seem to have infected hundreds at minimum, a few thousand potentially. They are the index case for up to 80% of the infections in South Kore. https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTER...
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