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Please note that Lombardy has a very very good health service. The OECD put a score on this [1]: 9.9/10. This is in the top 5% across all regions. Other europea
by esistgut 7y ago
Please note that Lombardy has a very very good health service. The OECD put a score on this [1]: 9.9/10. This is in the top 5% across all regions.
Other european regions seem to have lower average scores and their governments are not taking serious actions. [2]
How the US is reacting from my perspective (italian confined near Rome) seems borderline madness.
Something about this situation confuses me a lot.
[1] https://oecdregionalwellbeing.org/ITC4.html https://oecdregionalwellbeing.org/ITC4.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s85xG9Ol3Po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s85xG9Ol3Po
- datashow 7y agoActually this event may also become a test of the validity of those measures / indicators. One may argue those measures / indicators are not setup for this purpose.
- sciinfo 7y agoNo healthcare treatment in real life can be sufficient for an exponential growth of severe cases that require skilled staff and specialized equipment. Health service ranking focuses on treatment I suppose. We need a different ranking for epidemic prevention and control.
- mantap 7y agoPoliticians have no understanding of exponential growth. They look at low numbers and think "we have a lot of time" then are surprised later when they in fact don't.
- asdfaoeu 7y agoThe other thing is the incubation period is around 5 days. So really the numbers are at least 5 days behind.
- hermitdev 7y agoWhat I've been seeing is the experts think an individual may be infectious up to 14 days before showing symptoms, hence the 2 week wuatantine.
- afiori 7y agoIt can be up to 21-24, even if mostly it is under 14
- bdamm 7y agoAnd of course in the US there are not as many testing kits as in other countries, so the numbers are basically 3 months behind.
- standardUser 7y agoThe US is probably a much larger vector than we realize. The testing rate is the lowest in the world and Americans travel like mad. Who knows how many undiagnosed Americans have been globe trotting over the last couple weeks?
- anigbrowl 7y agoYou have no idea :-(
- Thlom 7y agoAnd you have millions without basic access to healthcare, meaning they will go around untreated passing the virus along to their fellow citizens.
- jdietrich 7y agoAlso no statutory entitlement to sick pay, so many people will drag themselves into work because they can't afford to take time off.
- fragsworth 7y agoWe should be quarantining every city in the U.S. right now. You're 100% correct, and it's going to be just as bad here.
- ppg677 7y agoIt might not be. Lower population density and a lack of public transportation. I would worry about NYC though.
- adrianN 7y agoLots of workers who can't stay home when they're sick without losing their job though.
- briandear 7y agoWhen? I keep hearing that, but where is the evidence?
- dpau 7y agono tests, no evidence
- davidw 7y agoSomething we can all do as individuals is stop going out to unnecessary things. I'm avoiding restaurants, bars, gyms and large groups.
- victor106 7y ago3B1B to the rescue https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago"Exponential growth" in itself isn't really the issue. If every week you have 10,000% as many cases as last week, you're screwed. If every week you have 105% as many cases as last week (i.e. 5% more), that's exponential, but after a year there would be less than a 13X increase, by which point there could be a vaccine or other measures that cause the weekly number to go from 105% to 95%. You can also have non-exponential growth and still have many new cases, if people are getting over their infections faster than they're infecting new people. If a million people were currently infected and every week 500,000 new people were infected but 500,001 of the existing infected people recovered, that means the number of currently infected people declines over time, but you'd still have 500,000 new cases every week and just about everybody might eventually get infected before it dies out, even if it eventually does. (This is similar to what happens with the flu, except that it has exponential growth in winter and then below exponential growth in the other three seasons, so the actually dying out never really comes.) To really get rid of it you want to have something like 100,000 cases last week and 75,000 cases this week and so on. But even then you might have 25,000 fewer cases this week because 50,000 people recovered but 25,000 new people got infected. So whether it has exponential growth or not isn't really the issue. It's what the growth rate is. A small exponential growth rate isn't catastrophic -- the number of cases grows but not so fast that everybody is infected by the time they have a vaccine or other more effective countermeasures that get the growth rate back below exponential. Most importantly, the growth rate isn't immutable. It's affected by things like people washing their hands and having effective testing and quarantines. So will things be fine? They will if people do the right things. Maybe some of them have been and some of them haven't. Maybe they'll get better at it going forward, maybe they won't. As a result there is a significant amount of uncertainty. But panic is useless. Even if all they can do is reduce the growth rate from 150% to 130%, that still buys more time to respond. Even if everybody ultimately gets it, better that it happen over five years than five months. And if some people are doing it wrong, try to help them do better. Everybody likes to see the bad orange man look stupid on the television, but maybe this is a situation where we come out better off with everybody working together.
- pfdietz 7y agoCalls to not panic are worse that useless. They are dangerous, extremely dangerous now. They lead to complacency and they will lead to death.
- BurningFrog 7y ago> Politicians have no understanding of exponential growth To be fair, that is true of 95% of humanity. These politicians are representative of their voters, as democracy should be.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago> These politicians are representative of their voters, as democracy should be. Isn't it that they make decisions on behalf of the voters and should take the best professional advice on their behalf?
- zo1 7y agoProfessional advice is not necessarily the best political advise, unfortunately. It's a giant PR/social-media game and they have to play it otherwise the other side will get the upper hand. It's very unfortunate that we've turned "democracy" into such a game instead of a mechanism for societal-level decision making.
- ben_w 7y agoDemocracy is just as vulnerable to Goodhart's law as everything else. I don’t have any well-thought-out solutions, but I am tickled by the idea of frequently anarchically randomising the way power gets donated from the people to the government.
- majewsky 7y agoI somewhat like the idea of having a democracy without parliament or elections. Instead, whenever a law needs to be made (either because the administration identifies the need or because something akin to a ballot initiative gets enough signatures) 100 people are drawn from the population at random and tasked with writing that law. They are allowed to summon/subpoena as many experts as they like to help them with drafting the law. The idea is that every citizen would be involved in one, maybe two laws in their entire lifetime, therefore giving them the sense that this is the one time they can contribute to politics in a meaningful way. Also their names are tied to that particular law forever, meaning that fear of social pressure could be more effective than for a politician who votes for 1000s of things in their political career.
- anticensor 7y agoThey do, but only when they want so, like they want endless exponential growth of economy but not energy consumption.
- FartyMcFarter 7y agoMost people don't think of 2% annual growth as exponential.
- alasdair_ 7y ago“Most people” could not accurately define the word “exponential” even if they were offered an exponential amount of money every year to do so.
- croon 7y agoTo be fair they'd be incentiviced not to... assuming they understand the exponential nature of the money, which I guess they don't. But as soon as they do learn they won't want to explain.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAlso, growth narrative is always about adding/subtracting percent points - which makes most people think this is a linear phenomenon, because they don't make the connection that the quantity discussed is a multiplier, and charts they see are on log scale.
- littlestymaar 7y agoAs long as you stay with low percentages, the linear approximation works pretty well: two times 1% lead to a 2.01% increase. But it starts breaking down as soon as you reach 10%. Little trick to know (with some good approximation) the doubling time of some low-percentage growing system: count it linearly up to 10% and then multiply by 7 (which is roughly the doubling time for 10% growth). Example: 2% => 5*7=35 years to double.
- atemerev 7y agoBecause at the beginning, a logistic curve is often confused with exponential growth. There are very few truly exponential processes in the nature. All things come to an end. Epidemics, population growth, economic growth... no such thing as exponential growth with limited resources.
- joking 7y agothe logistic curve is what happens to the initial exponential grow when there's no more way to grow, because there is no more population to infect or when severe social exclusion is set, but the initial grow is still exponential.
- drclau 7y agoThey don’t need an understanding of exponential growth, they only need to look at examples: China, extreme measures and barely contained it; Italy delayed measures, turning fast into a disaster. How many examples do we need?
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIn Denmark yesterday a couple of kids in the same class in a school were tested positive, they closed the classroom - not even the school. I would certainly like to see the example of a country able to learn from the mistakes of others.
- voqv 7y agoIn Germany a friend of mine refused to go to a meeting at a client's office where someone tested positive and HR threatened him because he was violating his employment contract.
- rorykoehler 7y agoAm in Germany. Everyone is acting like nothing is happening. It's infuriating.
- hef19898 7y agoWell, in Bavaria at least, people are forced to self-quarantine for two weeks if they had contact to people from o where in high risk areas. Same goes for children in schools and kindergardens. Some schools are closed already. Corporate travel came more or less to a halt and soccer games are most likely taking place without spectators. So yes, just business as usual.
- rorykoehler 7y agoI'm in Berlin and people are making zero effort to alter their usual patterns.
- remus 7y agoTrump providing a shining example of this! https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237027356314869761 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697...
- tomp 7y agoI don't get the criticism for Trump. He's just basically saying "don't panic" in his own way. That also seems to be consensus among the experts and on HN, judging by yesterday's "don't hoard" threads... (I disagree, but it seems I'm the minority.)
- licebmi__at__ 7y agoI think the POTUS should be held to a higher standard than this meme tier tweets. But hey, it have been almost 4 years, I guess we should be used to.
- tomp 7y agoSure, but what higher standard is that? The standard of "don't panic", currently followed by WHO and pretty much all heads of state (with possible exceptions being Putin and possibly Italy & Austria), or the standard of "panic", universally shunned by experts and wanna-be experts alike?
- remus 7y agoYou can say "don't panic" without misleading people by using numbers completely out of context. By comparing the number of Corona virus cases and deaths to the annual flu deaths he is implying that the number of deaths from Corona virus in the US is low and the risk is negligible, and while it is currently low this completely misses the point that in other countries it has proven to be extremely contagious and has a much higher mortality rate than flu. In other words, there is a significant risk if adequate steps aren't taken to reduce the risk of transmission. See: Italy, China.
- 7y ago
- tomrod 7y agoThere is an answer, and it is political (thank you for allowing me the indulgence to bring this room-elephant up). There is a slow burn civil war between mission-focused bureaucrats and administration loyalists. Consider: https://twitter.com/Imm_Judges_NAIJ/status/1237151516395536384?s=19 https://twitter.com/Imm_Judges_NAIJ/status/12371515163955363...
- pacala 7y agoI'm not even sure who are the "mission-focused bureaucrats" and who are the "administration loyalists" in that thread. But for the love of God, can we please stop politicizing this issue? Can we please have a moratorium on blaming the other side for whatever measures should / should not be taken? Frankly, nobody knows what to do. Here we are, pondering what to do with the kids. * The school district is open for business in spite of being the ground zero of USA outbreak. Because no kid has tested positive yet. Meanwhile, the testing scale is tiny [thousands, in a nation of 300M] and the latency is horrendous [5 days]. Most likely the virus is already endemic in the kid population. * OK, so let's keep the kids at home, as SPS will eventually have to face the obvious and close the schools. For how long? A week? A month? Until summer? Until next year? Send them to school and pray for the best once everybody in the family eventually gets the disease?
- dodobirdlord 7y ago> But for the love of God, can we please stop politicizing this issue? Can we please have a moratorium on blaming the other side for whatever measures should / should not be taken? Hard to do, when the correct thing for the administration to do is to stand back and hand decision making authority and control of resources to the bureaucracy. As long as the administration keeps interfering in the response, anything about the issue can't avoid being political.
- makomk 7y agoThere's actually a really good test of your claim: the botched CDC rollout of testing kits. The CDC went about developing and producing the kits just like they would for any other disease under any other administration, free from meddling and micro-management, and they botched the rollout. The issue was immediately politicized. Mainstream publications made it a point of saying that it was the "Trump administration" that butched the rollout, blamed the lack of micro-management, and there's an endless wave of conspiracy theories everywhere about this being a deliberate cover-up by Trump.
- nickserv 7y agoI spent a few months in the region with a sick toddler and can attest to the speed, quality and friendliness of the public health system there. That the virus is spreading so quickly, and that the health system is getting overwhelmed is cause for real concern. If northern Italy can't handle the outbreak, I'm not sure anywhere will do much better.
- giu 7y agoI'm very worried about southern Italy; the medical infrastructures are not really top-notch down there, sadly. Disclaimer: I've spent quite a lot of holidays in the south, since both my parents grew up there.
- horsebetting 7y agoNote that OECD's 9.9/10 is based on mortality rate and life expectancy, and therefore not a direct indicator of health service quality. Maybe the air in Italy is just very clean and the food healthy.
- MLpractitioner 7y agoAir quality is the lowest in all Italy in Lombardy, as it is a plain with the most industries of the countries, so if anything there would be an anticorrelation because of that.
- conanbatt 7y agoThe CDC is updating their recommendations for healthcare providers several times a day. There's plenty of epidemiologists working on this topic in the us: shutting down airports and roads also kill people and it has varying effects depending on the point of the epidemic you are in. I can't believe I'm saying this as a libertarian but you have to put some faith into the government's action here. The public in a panic already took away all the masks healthcare providers needed to safely attend patients, diminishing the capacity to serve.