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Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

bbc.com

331–340 of 915 posts

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#331
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely random and off-topic. I'm in the US and used to 12-hour time. I personally prefer 24-hour time, and am comfortable with 18:00 or similar for a time indicator. I don't know that I've ever seen a 24-hour time with am/pm attached to it. Is this common?

To feed off your random comment, I live in the US as well but switched all of my clocks (that I was able to) over to 24-hour time a few years ago. It just makes more sense to me. But everybody around me thinks I'm some sort of weirdo for it.

I've got a handful of software (Skype, my ereader) that don't have 24h time options. Super annoying, especially for software where all they'd have to do is use the OS time convention.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#332

I think the sequence of choices is what matters most. First they ‘quarantined’ Lombardia and some surrounding provinces. This looked nonsensical, or worse, as the contagion spread was nationwide already. Not two full days after, they are extending the restrictive measures to the whole of Italy. The net result is to have scared back home a lot of people working or studying in Lombardia, thereby easing the potential bu…

You left really early. What indicators were you looking at to make the call? Is it just you?

In a major west coast city and trying to think through when to leave. Too early better than too late but I don’t have a cabin in the mountains so it will be a significant cost to hide out for a month.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#333
post #179
post #124

Just spoken to an Italian friend, apparently they got a few hours notice before this was enforced (much more kept under-wraps than the previous quarantine of Northern Italy). Expect other Western European Countries to follow this pattern as the number of cases increase [1]. I would specifically be looking at France, Spain and Germany as potential next candidates. If people here haven't already, I would recommend not…

People in the UK have already been panic buying, mostly pasta and toilet roll AFAICT

Australia has had every supermarket totally cleared of toilet paper for 2 weeks now. Long life foods have had unstable availability as well. At least everyone will be stocked up while the supply chain is still fine and before any real issue comes up.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#334
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - Flybe is the British Alitalia, they would have cracked at the first crisis anyway. Still, I'm happy to bet that, by June, they will not be the only airline to have folded.

Most national flagship carriers will get bailed out, you can bet on that.

Is this something British people support? Or just something you see as inevitable?

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#335
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just a generation ago having a large catholic, and poor, family was one of the most prominent qualities of Italian life. I would not say so, no. That's speculation, this has not been true even for the south for a long time now. The only large, poor families you see are from immigrants nowadays.

What is a long time? I lived and worked in the Central part in Emilia Romanga, an affluent albeit largely communist part of Italy, and I saw it amongst farming families, although most had since abandoned Catholicism. Many of the older children had left for Germany, Switzerland, Austria or Holland for work to send money back home. But, and this was just my personal experience since I was in the EU during the financial…

An aside: why PIIGS? Couldn't they go by GIPSI instead?

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#336
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another interesting thing I have just noticed is that some journalists are now openly praising the Chinese handling of the crisis. I think this is a very interesting effect. China has a fantastic ability to mobilize as one when needed. The vast majority of the time, the insane amount of control this requires, is something we're simply not comfortable with giving to governments. But sometimes, just sometimes, the re…

>What makes China feel alien to us is that this is their default stance. Isn't having a massive military Americas default stance as well?

Parent's comment had nothing to do with military, but with an authoritarian executive's power to unilaterally get things done quickly, if they so desire.

The US was sometimes able to mobilize quickly in response to extraordinary circumstances (WWII production being an example), but that isn't really our default state, and requires consensus-building rather than orders from on high. But sadly our ability to do so even in extraordinary circumstances has atrophied.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#337
post #249
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the UK have already been panic buying, mostly pasta and toilet roll AFAICT

The toilet roll thing seems to be everywhere (Germany is full of "why toilet paper!" outrage as well), but do people really panic buy so much? Toilet paper is an item you buy once every few weeks or months, depending on household size, it's very high volume per unit of money so shops stock just enough to satisfy an even random distribution of individual buying times. Now if all of a sudden, triggered by news, a consi…

This reminds me of the phenomenon where a slowdown in traffic on a road causes all of the cars to bunch up. And then after the blockage is gone, the bunch up continues to cause more cars to bunch up and the slowdown exists long after the issue is gone. It seems like the fact that toilet paper is gone causes people to buy it whenever its available which causes it to be gone.

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#338
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's behaving entirely consistently with how he always has: deny everything, project perfection. > There's no signal here of a secret weapon, it's a complete shit show. Can't really disagree, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with the way people in the US are talking about the response now. Was the US MSM not spending all of January and February telling us "calm down, you know the common flu kills WAY more peo…

I don't remember much opposition to that order and I can't find any now.

You must not have been paying much attention then.

> The Trump administration’s quarantine and travel ban in response to the Wuhan coronavirus could undercut international efforts to fight the outbreak by antagonizing Chinese leaders, as well as stigmatizing people of Asian descent, according to a growing chorus of public health experts and lawmakers.[0]

> The Trump administration’s decision to severely restrict travel from China to the US and to implement a mass quarantine, the first in the US in more than 50 years, could be an overreaction that causes unnecessary fear and weakens the global response[1]

I can provide more if you’re not convinced that, just like every single other thing Trump does, right or wrong, he was attacked for actions related to the Coronavirus earlier this year...

0: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/04/coronavirus-quarati...

1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/04/coronavirus-...

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#339
post #272

This is an account from one of the doctors in Italy. https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753... Read the whole thing, but this passage in particular is just chilling. "5/ Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are start…

Does that mean they're just triaging them and letting them die?

That's exactly what it means. If you go in /r/europe there was an interview with a doctor posted confirming this https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ffs5ng/coronavirus_...

Re: Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% of the population is over 60. Only 17% of the Chinese`population is over 60. We should expect to see a devastating impact on Italy with a much higher CFR. https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2020/

And yet Germany (median age 48, nearly the oldest in the world, slightly older than Italy and similar to Japan) has seen only two deaths so far out of ~1,100 cases. I've yet to see a definitive explanation for the extreme difference between what we're seeing in Italy vs South Korea vs Germany when it comes to mortality rates. Italy has a developed-world, universal healthcare system. Perhaps the cases in Germany are n…

another fairly obvious explanation would also be that the Italy's numbers are underreported and there's significantly more sick people, which would also explain the healthcare breakdown.

Because I have no real explanation how a few hundred people on ventilators are supposed to bring the healthcare system down.

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