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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

#381

Post by garmaine »

adinobro wrote: post #178
garmaine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China dropped the ball for a full 10 days back when the disease was nicely contained to a small part of Wuhan... Uh, China dropped the ball for a full 3 months since the first reports of a novel respiratory disease started back in November . First denying it, then jailing the doctors who tried to raise the alarm. Not to mention not enforcing their own laws regarding food hygiene put in place after SARS which would…

New viruses come out all the time. This viruses wasn't isolated as different till the end of December. The Doctor wasn't jailed ... The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market. Until we know where it started we don't know if it would have stopped the virus or not.

> The virus was spread at the market. It didn't start at the market.

The virus came from bats. The "wildlife market" in question sold raw bat meat. How else would it have gotten there?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#382

Post by nullc »

beamatronic wrote: post #372
res0nat0r wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA is going to be in terrible shape very soon, just look at this as of tonight: https://twitter.com/davidenrich/status/1239004689338970113

I cannot understand why unnecessary flying was not shut down weeks or months ago.

Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. :) Now scale this up to the whole country and account for the fact that HN is probably a little better on average about reasoning about these things.

But now, on HN now we're mostly preaching to the choir...

I've been contacting the officials of my state and surrounding communities since February 28th urging action. If your community isn't taking action you should join in. Even if your politicians don't respond to math, they'll still respond to public outcry.

The best time to respond was a while ago, but today is still vastly better than tomorrow.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#383

Post by bryanrasmussen »

joe_the_user wrote: post #307
delegate wrote: post #46

I've seen comments here trying to play down the message or discredit the signatories of this letter. Don't. Please take it seriously. This is not sensationalism. What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I'm writing this from Barcelona, Spain. This last Sunday, 6 days ago, I went on a walk with my girlfriend, had a nice lunch, too…

What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I gotta say this but I don't think we should put forward the position that total lockdown is an irrational position. Total lockdown seems fully rational, not a product of mere panic at all. Total lockdown worked in Wuhan. Absolute and complete isolation inherently results in exponential de…

I was going to say surely not the largest loss of life but you're right, the high estimate of the Civil War was 1 million, the low estimate of this would be a little over 3 million. I guess if you put all the Indian wars together it might be more, but that seems cheating.

on edit: saw your other comment, and you're correct, little over 2 million is the low but totally unrealistic estimate.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#384

Post by chongli »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #359
chongli wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth. It's just too fast for our primitive brains. In some sense, we are standing in the middle of the road, frozen like deer in the headlights. Science is supposed to mitigate the shortcomings of our natural intuitions and cognitive biases. The problem is that most people are not scientists. When a non-scientist is asked to trust a scientist, he or she is subj…

by intuitively I suppose you mean feel it, which I guess is true, but it does not take a genius to actually understand the concept, especially if it is explained as right now you will get this many people per day, in a week you will get this many, in a month this many. That is pretty easy, a politician should be able to follow it. But as has been pointed out before most people think if you do something big and dramat…

One way to test this is to ask random people the question:

"The number of lily pads on a pond double every day. If it takes 20 days for the lily pads to completely cover the pond, how long does it take to cover half the pond?"

I think you will be surprised by how many people say "10 days."

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#385

Post by lojack »

tcbawo wrote: post #255
smacktoward wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the spread in our city is quite low for now If you’re in the United States, where testing has been infuriatingly limited, the fact of the matter is you have no idea what the spread in your community is. The numbers aren’t low because nobody has the virus, they’re low because nobody has been tested. If we did actual testing, they might come in low or they might come in high, who knows. As it stands, nobody has any r…

The state of Ohio has only 26 confirmed cases, but two days ago the Director of the Ohio Department of Health estimated that 1% of the state's population (100k) may be infected due to the high ratio of cases being community-spread [1]. This is the likely reason for such a high number of celebrities in the news testing positive -- it's already everywhere; they are the only ones getting tested. [1] https://www.wkyc.com…

Not to downplay things, but celebrities may also be more likely to get it because they travel a lot and are in close contact with a lot of other people who also travel a lot.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#386

Post by arvinsim »

cercatrova wrote: post #339
hatenberg wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly self preservation stops at simple math. We need to confront the fact that democracy in the West by now elects people who sell the most comfortable lies instead of people who help adaptation to reality.

Political leadership being self serving while convincing people that they are not has been true throughout history, and will continue to do so in the future. There is no way to stop this without modifying human nature itself. I cannot blame the voting populace, yet at the same time, I cannot blame the politicians either. They are part of a larger system of incentives.

Then perhaps we need a better version of democracy. Or a better system of government altogether.

I am hopeful that human civilization and ingenuity can invent or discover that. I am just not confident that it would be anytime soon.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#387

Post by ImprovedSilence »

cameldrv wrote: post #325
graeme wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a lot to do with their age distribution. Their fatality rate by age is similar to elsewhere. A large fraction of the infected cult members were young. Korea also hasn’t had any hospital breakdown related increase in the death rate. Chloroquine may indeed work, but the Korean stats are misleading if you don’t adjust for ages.

China’s fatality rate is also way down. Partly of course from less stress on the medical system, but they’ve also just learned a lot about how to treat it, particularly what drugs to use. I believe Chloroquine + Liponavir/Ritanovir + Interferon or Ribavirin is state of the art.

I thought that remdesivir was the drug showing the most promise? What happened with that one? And my big questions are how soon can they spool up world supplying levels of batches?

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#388

Post by newtoday »

delegate wrote: post #46

I've seen comments here trying to play down the message or discredit the signatories of this letter. Don't. Please take it seriously. This is not sensationalism. What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I'm writing this from Barcelona, Spain. This last Sunday, 6 days ago, I went on a walk with my girlfriend, had a nice lunch, too…

Thank you. Same here in the US. If you are in the US and still shrugging this off, please head all the warnings. The time to act was two weeks ago, and we won't make up that lost opportunity of effort for prevention and precaution.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#389

Post by nostrademons »

MetalGuru wrote: post #330
zozbot234 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't forget-- the numbers we see now are a look at the PAST. The infection incubates silently for a median 5 days. Then symptoms present. Then a week goes by with relatively mild illness. THEN shit gets real. And the "shit gets real" part only occurs 20% of the time, give or take - which means the virus might spread quite a bit while showing symptoms no more severe than a common cold. That also introduces some fur…

It gets hospital-level serious for 20% of cases? I thought the lethality rate wasn’t even that high for the most at-risk demographics (something like 14%).

Yes, hospital-level serious for 20% of cases. 5-10% require ICU care. The ~2% fatality rate is with ICU support and ventilation. When the hospitals get overrun it increases to ~7%, which is what we saw in Wuhan and now Italy. Your chance of dying if you do need hospitalization but don't get it appears to be > 50%.

Death rates by age range also assume ICU care. It's virtually unheard of for healthy middle-aged people if they have access to good medical care, but plenty of 30- and 40-somethings can and have died from it once the hospitals are overrun.

Re: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

#390

Post by [deleted] »

warent wrote: post #270
joe_the_user wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame on her People should stay where they are. Lockdown is not a disaster. People fleeing lockdown are literally the carriers of this disaster. Stay where you are, wait. Don't travel. Don't fight the locdown. Lockdown is the current, appropriate course of action. A very effective lockdown can eliminate the infection in, well, however long it took to eliminate it in Wuhan. Fleeing the lockdown now is just going to an…

I didn't see them say anything about "fleeing a lockdown." She was fleeing a potentially life-threatening virus in a scary situation in order to be with her family. That isn't so hard to grok, and obviously she felt she was making the right decision. Shaming someone for looking for security and safety in a scary situation (i.e. for being human) is just absurd.

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