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Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country

bbc.com

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

#901

Post by coldtea »

shadow28 wrote: post #777
coldtea wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let's just wait for a million dead like they expect in Italy then... that would be a proper, timid, reaction...

You just pulled that number out of your ass, didn't you?

Andrea Ricciardi, Professor of Hygiene and adviser to the Ministry of Health: "The most frightening point is the pitted figures on how much the virus can spread. the curves of the graphs elaborated by the epidemiologists and not only in Italy: according to the models, it could strike until 60% of the population, which means that according to the mortality rates there could be a million deaths only in Italy."

Feel happy now about the ad-hominem?

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

#902

Post by coldtea »

hef19898 wrote: post #822
coldtea wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not how epidemics work. That's not how epidemics work when they are contained quickly. Europe has done a bad job at this. Epidemics in the past have killed many times as many as the percentages above.

Different diseases, different outcomes. First, using the total population as a basis is just wrong. Some will certainly be immune to a certain degree while others are simply lucky. Even very aggressive pandemics, hitting totally ill-prepared societies didn't infect every single person. Not even the black death managed to do so. So why do you think COVID-19 would end up doing that? And using the 3.4% is another issue.…

Andrea Ricciardi, Professor of Hygiene and adviser to the Ministry of Health: "The most frightening point is the pitted figures on how much the virus can spread. the curves of the graphs elaborated by the epidemiologists and not only in Italy: according to the models, it could strike until 60% of the population, which means that according to the mortality rates there could be a million deaths only in Italy."

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

#903

Post by dboreham »

fruffy wrote: post #879
dboreham wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the beginning, in Wuhan.

I rather consider Wuhan to be the textbook case of a mass-panic in the face of an unknown virus. What I am primarily concerned about is the people's reaction and the economic effects which seem unprecedented (at least in recent decades). This has a much larger impact than the virus itself. Why is the effect so big compared to other pandemics? Is it because of the way infections and deaths are tracked (which might hav…

>This has a much larger impact than the virus itself.

That's only because we're considering one branch in the multiverse though, right? If we get in our time machine and imagine that we didn't have the "mass-panic", then presumably the impact of the virus would therefore be much worse.

>Why is the effect so big compared to other pandemics?

Compared to the 1918 flu you mean? I guess I'm not sure what other pandemic we have had recently to compare with.

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

#904

Post by rglullis »

dang wrote: post #899
rglullis wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for understanding the spirit of my comment. I will take this flag as a very good lesson in risk management: no matter how many times you are positive in the exchange, the one time that you strike out can be fatal.

Yes, and the effect is worse because there's a massive disconnect between how we perceive our own intent and how it comes across to readers on the internet--or at least to some segment of readers, but when the community is large enough, every segment is an entire audience.

I can see your point. But if we are going meta... the discussion was going for quite some time exclusively between me and hef and though it got "heated" at one point, I didn't get the feeling that it was derailing at just some senseless uncivil exchange of insults. It is the kind of thing that can happen between a group of people talking at the bar, not just the internet.

Also, precisely due to this disconnect between what we write and how it can be perceived, it does seem helpful to me to occasionally have some curved ball thrown into the mix to help calibrate my sense of (a) where the other party is coming from and (b) check if the other party is willing to listen to you or just participate in a screaming match.

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

#905

Post by notaki »

jopsen wrote: post #795
cocoggu wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, this is really the main reason why this virus is spreading globally. In fact, the average incubation period seems to be 5 days, which is already a lot. But apparently, some subjects had an incubation period up to 24 days, if correct, this is huge and the main reason why it suddenly raised in Italy. Imagine only one relatively social person in Italy, in 24 days he/she can probably meet at least 50 perso…

Risk of infecting others when you're without symptoms is supposedly small.. I'm by no means an expert, but to me the problem seems to be lack of proactive social distancing; and lack of proactive testing of everyone with symptoms. Current guidelines seems statistically sound, it's just that we have little mitigation for the few that do slip through.

"People who contract the novel coronavirus emit high amounts of virus very early on in their infection, according to a new study from Germany that helps to explain the rapid and efficient way in which the virus has spread around the world."

"The researchers found very high levels of virus emitted from the throat of patients from the earliest point in their illness —when people are generally still going about their daily routines"

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-...

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

#906

Post by handedness »

fspeech wrote: post #235
handedness wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National debt may be a numbers game, but it's not merely that. There's nothing simple about any ECB decision on monetary policy, and the composition of the EU when combined with the nature of the Euro is such that pain almost by definition can't be evenly distributed.

ECB already implicitly backs every country's bonds. They just need to stick to their stance. After the crisis is over there will be time to work out the cost sharing among European countries.

That is a completely hollow guarantee, though.

The ECB's balance sheets are bad enough as it is, and one country's "cost sharing" is another country's forced-austerity to bail out another country's bad loans.

The Eurosystem has serious issues that are about to get even worse. The ECB is practically insolvent by their own standards, and would be technically insolvent by American standards.

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

#907

Post by newtoday »

hurrdurr2 wrote: post #589
newtoday wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geez, what part of the country if you don't mind me asking? Arrogance, ignorance, and disinformation is literally going to kill us. Thanks for sharing that.

Bay Area, CA

Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm not surprised. What movie? ;)

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

#908

Post by Rebelgecko »

dragonwriter wrote: post #773
Rebelgecko wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how much that counts since my understanding is that the president's decrees are essentially laws, and when the judicial branch said that was unconstitutional the president just ignored them. Not exactly a lot of checks and balances.

That absolutely is a (strong) Presidential Republic, a term which does not depend on checks and balances (though some Presidential Republics feature that trait.)

I thought that in a presidential republic the head of state can't write laws themselves?

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

#910

Post by plutonorm »

mytherin wrote: post #759
plutonorm wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more fear, not less. Fear will save lives.

Not necessarily. Excess panic can easily create more destruction than the disease ever would have. Look at the hospital that was burned down in Iran because of misinformation about the coronavirus.

Fair point. But you do need a bit of fear. What we have at the moment is complete denial and it's dangerous. Although that does seem to be changing in the last few days.
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