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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

#31
post #24

Reminder for those in despair... It is merely enough to make the r0 after containment measures less than 1. Then the problem will eventually go away. As someone said, social distancing measures to work must be done when it seems to be overreacting. And if they work, it will seem as if we overreacted.

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!"

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

#32
post #26

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/…

3.65% / 1.75% ~ 2.09, so the difference in age profile might explain a factor 2 in the mortality ratio of Italy vs South Korea. The actual ratio is currently 7.9: 827 out of 12462 cases in Italy (6.6%), 66 out of 7869 cases in South Korea (0.84%).

If you factor in collapse of medical services -- Italy ran out of ventilators / ICU beds--the gap becomes clearer. You have to look at over 60 as more likely to be hospitalized, putting strain on medical system.

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

#33
> South Korea has since reported 67 deaths out of nearly 8,000 confirmed cases, after testing more than 222,000 people. In contrast, Italy has had 1,016 deaths and identified more than 15,000 cases after carrying out more than 73,000 tests on an unspecified number of people.

Surely the testing is a huge factor. Test more people you'll find more people infected, so the fatality rate will get smaller. If you're like the US and test very few you get the huge fatality rates we saw in Washington.

If you could quickly and accurately test everyone in the country today we would know how to isolate and the whole thing would be over very soon. Not having a reliable test makes this whole problem as bad as it is.

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

#34
I noticed something else that might be an interesting correlation: available "acute" hospital beds.

I don't have time to do the full correlation, but here's the data:

https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=30183

Select "Curative (acute) care beds"

Scroll down to the Per 1000 population.

Italy: 2.62

Korea (assuming South): 7.14

The list of countries in that table is a good bit shorter than the countries fighting Covid-19, but I think it might be illuminating.

Can someone draw that up? Compare, perhaps, current death rate by country with available "Curative (acute) care beds" per 1000?

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

#36
post #5

Just curious, does anybody know how did Japan manage to do so well, inspite of a very old population. Also what does HN think is the better place to be right now? A mega city or a small village?

City or village, you'll need one where store clerks don't come in to work when sick due to lack of sick days and no one avoids testing and doctors for lack of insurance.

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

#37
post #31
post #24

Reminder for those in despair... It is merely enough to make the r0 after containment measures less than 1. Then the problem will eventually go away. As someone said, social distancing measures to work must be done when it seems to be overreacting. And if they work, it will seem as if we overreacted.

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!"

and what if it died down due factors other than social distancing? You're positing an irrefutable claim which is sloppy logic.

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

#38
post #24

Reminder for those in despair... It is merely enough to make the r0 after containment measures less than 1. Then the problem will eventually go away. As someone said, social distancing measures to work must be done when it seems to be overreacting. And if they work, it will seem as if we overreacted.

Much like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

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

#39
post #5

Just curious, does anybody know how did Japan manage to do so well, inspite of a very old population. Also what does HN think is the better place to be right now? A mega city or a small village?

My hypothesis is that Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore had to contend with earlier SARS outbreak and responded more quickly and comprehensively with contact tracing, social distancing.

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

#40
S.Korea is also effectively an island - water 3 sides + sealed N.Korea border. I don't think it's useful comparing large interconnected EU countries response capabilities against Asian Tigers islands (Korea, Singapore, Taiwan) with deep collectivist cultural roots and large demographics that still remember living under centralized authoritarian rule. In the case of Singapore and China, still are.

Italy has too much travel, old demographics and interconnected borders to respond the way Korea did. And we don't even know if Korea is out of the woods yet, they got more clusters recently.

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