8 ms·
Containment gets harder every day we delay
- crispyporkbites 7y agoAfter 21 days, what happens? Do we lift the quarantine? Relax it a bit? Stay in quarantine indefinitely? What does the model look like for that? Without a full picture the initial strategy could make things worse in the long run.
- myko 7y agoAfter the first wave self quarantining should be able to start ramping down It just depends on the number of cases in your local area
- crispyporkbites 7y agoThis is calling for a full shutdown, not self quarantine. We’re talking checkpoints, military presence to ensure compliance, protected supply chains and rationing. The model has to account for a long term strategy (6-12 months) to keep the mortality rate down and the global economy operating, or we open ourselves to even greater risks.
- kmonsen 7y agoLets be clear, the economy will not survive anything like that for even one month. We are desperately hoping that after 2-3 weeks herd immunity, better medicine and first wave passing we can reopen.
- mcnamaratw 7y agoHerd immunity is what Italy is doing. I guess their economy is more severely impacted than South Korea's. I don't know.
- kmonsen 7y agoI agree we need to follow South Korea. I said this is what we are hoping for, not meaning it is in any way a smart thing to do. I don’t think the economy can survive 1-2 months in full lockdown. There are just too many vulnerable living paycheck to paycheck, and the financial system artificially boosted already and is ready to come crashing down. I think it is impossible to speculate what will happen after that, but it looks like the big money wants this thing to go down from what is happening in the UK and in the US senate. Could be in for scary times in the west.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoWe can have a mandatory regulatory lockdown without draconian enforcement. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoWe Pulse-Wide-Modulate a case rate that is just soo below what the strained public health system can take, prioritize the most important economic systems slowly back to life and hope that the vaccazines come just in time to end this nightmare. After that reforms. Lots of them.
- nullc 7y agoFortunately, as time goes on we'll improve our ICU capacity and it's likely that some anti-viral treatments will turn out to be effective, which should diminish the ICU load. We could within half a year-- given massive impact from deaths and shutdowns encouraging bypassing some amount of protocol-- have clonal antibody treatments that prevent hospitalization in a large portion of infections.
- ohazi 7y ago> as time goes on we'll improve our ICU capacity This seems unlikely. On what timescale do you think this will happen?
- dillonmckay 7y agoPrioritize ‘the most important economic systems’ is very subjective, unfortunately. Who decides the ‘winners’, as grotesque as that sounds?
- gpderetta 7y agoI don't know, maybe the bits that keep the population fed and the lights on. That seems a start.
- dillonmckay 7y agoOk, so restaurant supply companies, like Sysco, or the Krogers, Publix, etc.? Linemen for powerline infrastructure, HVAC and telecom techs to maintain the cell towers? Truck drivers to deliver chemicals needed for both water and waste-water treatment? Also, transporting the sludge afterwards? Garbage pickup? Doctors,nurses, police, firefighters, 911 dispatchers? What am I not thinking of?
- iso947 7y agoChina may be able to do regular lockdowns. I can’t see that happening in the west. Lockdown needs to be a one time shot at the right time, but getting the right time is painfully hard when there is no way to know how many have the virus but not yet testing positive or showing symptoms.
- gman83 7y agoI keep hearing this, but why though? If cases start rising again after the end of a quarantine, I'm sure that there will be support in the community to go back in quarantine if it will save lives.
- barry-cotter 7y agoDidn’t work that way in the 1918 flu pandemic. No city kept the public health interventions going long enough to avoid a second peak in deaths after they stopped them.
- zozbot234 7y agoGood point, and that's why you can't simply lift every restriction overnight. But the 1918 flu pandemic was literally over 100 years ago, I'd like to think we have learned something in the meantime about how to control disease outbreaks.
- rabidrat 7y agoWe did learn things and it caused us to develop a national health care infrastructure. Things have started to decay on that front over the last couple decades though, at least in places like the US which haven't had a SARS outbreak. It's almost like we have to relearn lessons every 4 generations or so, as the older generation dies off and we forget their experiences. Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, here might be our Crisis...
- anoncareer0212 7y agoNot sure there will be - I've been scared of this since the New Year, and even I'm all too aware that I'm trading off _having a life_ so people over 70 with pre-existing conditions don't have a couple of years shaved off. Right now, like literally starting this weekend, it turned hip to say you're staying home. We'll see how that looks in 6 weeks, when there's no end in sight and mass layoffs Please, for the love of God, give me the benefit of the doubt on this comment folks. I'm not saying it's right, only that I doubt this sedate state will persist, given the effects of said state.
- zozbot234 7y ago> Relax it a bit? Looks like it will work like that. This may lead to some undetected transmission, but hopefully the amount of more serious cases should be low enough that the healthcare system will be able to cope. More severe measures can be restored quickly in areas where community transmission is detected.
- vvillena 7y agoThe lockdown must be kept until the health system can cope with everyone's health problems. Then, you slowly lift it to ensure it doesn't saturate again, as that would mean a need for another full lockdown.
- normalnorm 7y agoHow do you "slowly lift it"?
- nullc 7y agoBy lifting the most adversely impacting parts, and monitoring infection on a wide-spread basis while maintaining measures that lower the how contagious it is without negative effects.
- jpster 7y ago> monitoring infection on a wide-spread basis Temperature checks in every commercial, retail and residential building and mode of public transportation? > maintaining measures that lower how contagious it is Masks for all? Expecting 20 sec handwashing vigilance to stay indefinitely? Restaurant tables and desks at work kept meters apart? I’m wondering what the new normal looks like and how well it will be implemented in western countries.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 7y ago> Expecting 20 sec handwashing vigilance to stay indefinitely? This is not the same as the other two. People should wash their hands properly regardless. You shouldn't only call a cab after going out drinking, only because you know there'll be a checkpoint that night, right?
- jpster 7y agoThat may be true, but humans tend to get lax once the immediate crisis is over.
- astockwell 7y agoIt is a bit like comparing interest rates on your credit card balances while still spending more than you earn: we may not get much choice about what is done in 21 days, but we have to stop the bleeding now either way.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoRelax and eventually lift yeah, because you would've "starved" the virus out by not giving them new non-immune hosts to jump to.
- cm2187 7y agoThat's the bit I don't understand. The virus jumped from a handful of infected people on a market in china to hundreds of thousands all around the world in a few weeks. Unless we eliminated 100.0000% of the virus, how will it not pop up again as soon as we lift the curfew?
- brokensegue 7y agoat some point enough people have had it that we can get some herd immunity kicking in
- cm2187 7y agoYes, but I don’t think this is what quarantine achieves.
- brokensegue 7y agoquarantine slows the spread to a level the hospitals can deal with
- hk__2 7y agoRight now we don’t know if immunity lasts long enough for herd immunity to work.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoHerd immunity = aka giving up and killing millions globally. Fuck that shit and arrest everyone who suggests it on crimes against humanity.
- brokensegue 7y ago
- kmm 7y agoThat's what I'm asking myself too. It's way too early for any kind of herd immunity, and you only need a handful of people who have broken the rules (or simply due to delayed intrafamilial infection) to have a few infectious people back out in the wild, and we're back to square zero. Is the plan for a lockdown to completely eliminate the disease? Are we hoping the heat of the summer will stop it? Or does flatten the curve really mean that eventually 60-70% of the population will get infected. If so, we're in for a rough 2020.
- thaumaturgy 7y agoThe numbers I've seen so far are assuming 40% to 70% total infections over the next several months. The current efforts are just trying to take some energy out of the first wave of hospitalizations, to buy time for more supplies and staffing and to get the current infected out of health care as new cases come in. After a few weeks, it may turn out that hospital capacity and more widespread testing allows some restrictions to be lifted. Or, it may turn out that the situation in the US is far more severe than expected, and the restrictions will only worsen by then. I'm hoping for the former but betting on the latter.
- admax88q 7y agoFlatten the curve _does_ mean that 60-70% of the population will get it. But it also means that the peak will be lower do that hospitals are less overwhelmed. It also pushes more infections later in time, so that we have more time to develop and deploy a vaccine.
- thombat 7y agoNot back to square zero - you have the core of a new outbreak amidst wide-spread monitoring for it and a population that is generally practicing better infection control. So perhaps a few dozen are infected before the flames are doused again.
- atoav 7y agoThe difference between a slow and a fast outbrake is that the fast outbreak overwhelms the health system which has all sort of negative side effects, aside from more deads. I know humans usually have a hard time grasping exponential growth, but you need to grasp it to understand what is going on. Exponential growth means that on one day you say: "This is fine" and only two days later you have to introduce the triage and send people home to die, because there is no capacity for them. And even if you had enough beds — will you have enough healthy professionals to staff them? If they have kids will they be able to come? Who watches for them? Grandparents who have a ≥20% of dying once they got infected? The idea of quarantine is a numbers game: slow down the spread enough so the health system (and amthe rest of civilisation) can cope better If you have no vaccine the only way to deal with this is reducing the chances for the virus to transmit. And you do that by not having people cough in each other faces, touch everything, breath everything in etc. or even more effective: don't have them interact at all. If we all would manage to perfectly isolate for two weeks the thing would be gone after that two weeks. So until we will develope a cure at some point this is the only thing we can do.
- theseadroid 7y agosorry for spamming my own reply, but here's what 21 days after in China looks like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587840
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 7y agoI live in a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona. Since we get 1.5 million tourists a year, I expect things here to be similar to large cities in the US elsewhere. Most friends in town have adopted a fairly complete social distancing protocol in the last few days. This happened abruptly, no one seemed to be doing it a week ago. While social distancing helps, we should have had testing infrastructure in place much sooner. I am happy to blame Trump, and democratic and Republican Congress critters for that. A good six minute interview: https://twitter.com/azeem/status/1238734048018792449 https://twitter.com/azeem/status/1238734048018792449 EDIT: I posted this comment hoping to see comments from other people in the US on whether or not people were largely social distancing in their communities.
- williesleg 7y agoThat's racist.
- Analemma_ 7y agoI submitted this as a new story but it's worth repeating here: here in Seattle, we're already Italy [0]. The hospitals are having to provision ECMO machines based on demographic prognosis, and the respirators are probably only a couple days behind. Presumably this will be the situation in every major American city 2 weeks from now. [0]: https://twitter.com/scott_mintzer/status/1239290389963714562 https://twitter.com/scott_mintzer/status/1239290389963714562
- jupp0r 7y agoExcept there is no complete lockdown in Seattle ...
- turtlebits 7y agoI went to pick up an to-go order yesterday and was surprised to find the local mall parking lot still full (U village) and people sitting in restaurants, with no care for keeping distance from each other. Ditto for the grocery store. I guess people still aren’t taking it seriously, even though Seattle schools and libraries are closed for a month+.
- thombat 7y agoSunday afternoon the long distance trains in Germany had many Army and Navy personnel in uniform (which gets them free travel; may have been more in civvies paying their own way), including old reservists. We asked: they're preparing to institute mass isolation/quarantine, patrolling streets to "remind" people to stay at home. It isn't a question of "if" such measures will become necessary, it's just when will a country accept this, and how many extra deaths will be caused in that interval.
- rjeli 7y agoDoes anyone have another source for this?
- jupiter90000 7y agoSome guy in Philly who talked to an "intensivist" in Seattle that we get to hear about 3rd hand? Hmm, ok.
- raspasov 7y ago"So far, successful mitigaions in China/Korea have involved near-complete shutdown, very early in the epidemic, around the time of 100 confirmed cases." From what I read, South Korea shut down almost nothing but had widespread testing available, including drive-through testing where people could sit in their car, get tested and receive the results via SMS next day. They also had the ability to very proactively search and locate people that had been potentially exposed to the virus via credit card transaction/location data.
- cma 7y agoSchools were shut down very early on in the outbreak region I believe.
- bsaul 7y agoHow is it possible that SK has performed such an extensive testing, while other developped country state they don't have the technical ability to do more than a few thousands tests a week.. Did SK developp its own technics and device for testing ??
- asjw 7y agoSeegene, a private company, did https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-testing-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-...
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
- AncientTree 7y agoKorea will have to remain on alert, forever, as their population has no established immunity. A vaciine may never come - there is no influenza vaccine (it mutates every season). Plus, there are grim, yet economic, benefits if the sickest and most elderly die from Coronavirus, in the form of long-term savings on pensions and healthcare. This should be taken into account in strategic national planning. The UK approach seems the most sensible - keep the economy and society functioning, and recommend that the most vulnerable practice self-isolation. Better to isolate those who are not participating in the productive economy (ie. the sick and elderly) than the entirety of the population.
- mcnamaratw 7y agoI think touting the benefits of widespread deaths is off topic here.
- fkistner 7y agoGerman here. Cannot disagree more strongly with your point! No, the economic benefit of “having the sickest and most elderly die” should most definitely not be taken into account in strategic national planning. Every life is precious. This line of thought is exactly what lead the Nazis to murder hundreds of thousands they considered an economic burden. Never forget.
- DrNuke 7y agoYes, that’s explicitly considering to kill 500k old and vulnerable persons, as for the official doc leaked to The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/uk-covid-19-strategy-questions-unanswered-coronavirus-outbreak https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/uk-cov...
- thombat 7y agoIf you consider a simplistic economic model then there should be no public pensions or healthcare at all. The moment that somebody's direct economic output falls below a defined threshold, be it due to retirement, illness, lack of retraining in a changing job market, then they represent a liability to be efficiently removed. Fortunately more sophisticated approaches are generally followed, since in practice humans aren't simply worker ants or feedstock for Solyent Green.
- contravariant 7y agoForecasting Germany as if it were Italy isn't entirely fair, given that Germany has only had 9 deaths with 5000 confirmed cases while Italy had close to 200 deaths by the time they managed to confirm 5000 cases. As far as I can tell the situation does seems to be developing at the same rate, but going by the confirmed deaths I'd place Germany about 2 weeks behind Italy, not a mere 7 days. Which for exponential growth matters a lot. Edit: Also note that forecasting countries as if they were South Korea has the opposite problem as the fatality rate of South Korea has remained low compared to other countries (though not as low as Germany's and those of Scandinavia).
- ygra 7y agoRight now the official explanation is that we're quite good with testing and isolating cases so far, which would mean that the confirmed count right now is much closer to the actual count than in Italy (or the US). On Twitter the opinion seems mostly to be that the death cause is doctored. I'm kinda hoping for the first, right now, because the projections aren't pretty (even if we're a bit further behind Italy). We only now started shutting down schools, and most events and even that is spotty as every state does its own thing and sometimes even every city.
- contravariant 7y agoTo be honest at first I found it suspiciously low, but now that the Scandinavian countries are very low as well it would require quite the conspiracy to keep this up.
- gcatalfamo 7y agoAs Italian I can confirm you guys should hurry and close everything down sooner. I would however prefer the title said “don’t be like the Italian government” instead of just “Italy”. Not everybody here is behaving like a moron, luckily.
- easytiger 7y agoWhat's the point in closing everything down? What happens when it reopens? Will the virus admit defeat and run away?
- sneak 7y agoTo assume good faith in your question: the point is to slow the spread, and to flatten the curve so that the hospital system is not overburdened and that as few people as possible that need emergency critical medical care fail to receive it.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> so that the hospital system is not overburdened To go one step further, it's to reduce the mortality rate. Mortality when everyone has access to a respirator is one thing. Mortality when hospitals must deny care to thousands is another. Distancing slows down the rate so we spend more time in the first scenario. (It's too late, now, to entirely avoid it.)
- asjw 7y agoMortality rate in Italy was high only for people 65 and up. But lot more have been brought to hospitals for no real reason, once they were there they couldn't be sent home anymore In fact home confinement has increased a lot once they understood not everyone was in need of medical attention Hell, we even tested people with no symptoms at the beginning because they said they weren't feeling fine or one of their acquittance had flu in the previous week's That of course became immediately problematic for the healthcare system
- scurvy 7y agoHow are California and Washington "behind" Italy, when both states had infections reported before Italy? Sorry, trying to understand the methodology here. Or are you just basing this off of raw case counts?
- originalvichy 7y agoI'm sorry to sound so cynical, but I have never seen so many statisticians and virologists pop up on the internet drawing all sorts of graphs and estimates. For all we know this person got their numbers by just guesstimating. Most countries have differing "exposure vectors" so to say, which means that just comparing other countries to Italy is nonsense.
- m0zg 7y ago>> never seen so many statisticians and virologists pop up The same people were prominent internet economists and political scientists just a month ago. They have many talents.
- topher515 7y agoFrom the "Appendix / methodology" section at the bottom of the page: > "Day 1" is when a country reaches 100 cases. A country is "X days behind Italy" if they reached 100 cases that many days after Italy did.
- benkuhn 7y ago> "Day 1" is when a country reaches 100 cases. A country is "X days behind Italy" if they reached 100 cases that many days after Italy did. Before 100 cases, the evolution of the epidemic is noisy, but it becomes pretty regular afterwards with 20-30% daily growth (in the absence of strong control measures).
- asjw 7y agoAs an Italian living in one of the red areas I feel it's pretty hard to do better than Italy in the west if you are hit first South Korea had Seegen almost single handedly testing the population, China is not a standard of what a liberal democracy can do We did everything we could, I've been staying home for 3 weeks as of now, but we couldn't predict the virus spreading from the hospitals of small cities hitting hard on the elderly population 80% of the deaths are >75, 98% are >65, the avreage age of the deceased is 79.4 years old but if we look only at women their average age was 84.2 years (South Korea life expectancy is 82 years) and we counted every death as a coronavirus related death if the patient tested positive, but most of them died for pre-existing conditions, while other countries are not counting them if other conditions where already present (and I imagine old people at the hospital are there because they are already ill) So I must say that despite our own indiscipline, bad luck was a very strong factor in what happened BTW Spain is already looking worse than us at their same day
- nullc 7y agoWhere we can do better than Italy is learning from your experience and taking measures earlier: we aren't first. Even measures less aggressive than your lockdowns would be more effective if they were simply taken earlier. This isn't a criticism of Italy. Getting the political will to shut things down when there are few cases and no deaths is extremely hard. But the experience of Italy is showing all of us what our unwillingness to do so will cause.
- asjw 7y agoBut I bet nobody will, because you know nobody wants a lynch mob looking for them UK is still having giant music shows with thousands of people, Germany is not counting people with previous conditions, France had even a smurf convention (sigh!) We all have a family member living in one of the EU countries and are all calling home sick worried because nobody is doing anything because “The Italians, any old excuse to, you know, shut down everything and stop work for a bit and have a long siesta.” (it's not a joke, a British TV personality really said that) So maybe be like Italy and not like everybody else this time. Seriously, I've been confined 3 weeks and am fine, but my friends calling me from abroad are crying for help, because they want to come back, but can't.
- ck2 7y agoDon't be patient 31 https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTERS/0100B5G33SB/index.html https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTER... (but really, in USA too late, everyone is out and about coughing on each other)
- mothsonasloth 7y agoFor UK people: here is a discord server were we are trying to share information regionally and locally (teachers, students, professionals etc.) https://discord.gg/prydRc https://discord.gg/prydRc
- sneak 7y agoGatekeeping access to critical health data based on agreeing to the Discord ToS and Discord’s anti-anonymous-access policy is harmful. Please consider Mattermost or a mailing list so that everyone can participate.
- mothsonasloth 7y agoSorry what I mean, is for people (most of whom are gamer demographic at the moment). To chat and share information, support
- BryanBigs 7y agoJust so I'm clear...this analysis assumes the same amount of assisted breathing devices per capital as the Italian health Care system?
- michaelbuckbee 7y agoThis is just a general comment about all of these (really quite nice) data visualizations: they're based on confirmed cases. Given the many issues with the limited availability of testing this of real concern as it makes it much harder to judge the accuracy of "X days behind", etc.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe general response to this would be that the amount of testing can shift the prognosis by couple of days. Is New York 14 days behind Italy, or 10 days, or 20 days? Doesn't matter if no action is taken, and the best results will be achieved by taking action immediately.
- atoav 7y agoAlso this is very different per nation. E.g. Germany has labs in most university clinics and a tight network of private commercial labs, which are nearly all able to test for COVID-19, while the situation in Italy regarding tests was much much worse, so they didn't see it comming at all. So how can one really compare the numbers between nations when their testing capabilitied are so different? The ground truth is certainly deaths - if you know the mortality rate if the virus you can infer from the number of deaths how many people had been infected at some point in the past. Of course it would be much better to have an idea how many people are infected now, so you can base your decisions on it.. The dangerous thing about viruses is that they grow in a logistic curve and the first part of that curve is exponential. So things can grow out of proportion literally overnight, like they did in Italy.
- theseadroid 7y agoFor people who are curious what living in China feels like now (video uploaded Mar 14th), from a Japanese director living in Nanjing, China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM Things are getting back to normal, with tons of precautions.
- toxicFork 7y agoThis is very impressive.
- eBombzor 7y agoWow they pretty much thought of and solved every case where human contact could be possible. The elevator transportation in particular is pretty clever. Those Chinese cities are incredibly mobile. I can't even imagine how long it would take any US city to get to that point if ever.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- seemslegit 7y agoNot to downplay the importance of containment efforts I think there is something uniquely bad about Italy's mortality rates and something really good that the Germans are doing. Based on the Johns Hopkins CSSE data for March 13 On March 13 Germany had 3675 confirmed cases and only 7 deaths. Adjusted for respective populations Italy was at this stage 9 days before with 3089 confirmed cases, by which time it has already seen 107 deaths. This projects 21x COVID19 mortality rate for Italy over Germany - what gives ? Italy's outbreak is concentrated in Lombardy so maybe weighing for the population of that area rather than the entire country is more appropriate which means Germany is currently 16 rather than 9 days behind Italy but with mortality in Italy still being 13 times higher than Germany. Possible explanations: Italy's 3089 confirmed cases 9 days before are selected for severity - only people who arrived with acute symptoms were tested, whereas Germany's 3675 are the results of more proactive testing and are dominated by mild or non-symptomatic cases that would have passed undetected in Italy. Italy squandered some of its hospital capacity on first-diagnosed-first-hospitalized basis regardless of severity and began triage too late wheres Germany does better job prioritizing hospital vs home treatment from the start. 9 days before Lombardy's hospitals were already over capacity with 3089 confirmed cases while Germany's still aren't today. Germany has 2.5x the hospital beds per population than Italy, let's assume this holds for ICU beds as well. If capacity is the sole/dominant factor in this and we say that 9 days before Italy was already over capacity with 3089 cases than Germany will have reached a similar over-capacity at around 10k confirmed cases in a few days and then its mortality rate will begin to climb.
- alkonaut 7y agoSome more hypothetical explanations: - Italy has a large fraction of the population over 70. - The proportion of smokers is larger in Italy. - The amount of close contact between the “mobile” part of the population (in schools and offices) and elderly people may be higher. Not sure what the statistics are in Germany vs Italy on that final point but if I were to guess I’d say elderly taking care of grandchildren or even living together with the younger generation is a phenomenon that still exists in Italy.
- Etheryte 7y ago
- nemo44x 7y agoItaly last is a special case - not that everyone else doesn’t need to take exceptional action. To be sure social distancing, closures of places of congregation is in order, and safety practices like washing hands often are necessary. But Italy is a special case... - Italian leather manufacturing is by and large run by Chinese ownership today. - Many of the employees in these shops are from China as they will work for much less. - Italian population skews very old - a very vulnerable population. - Italian culture has close families that meet near daily, have generational family living together, and populations are proximal. - The wide Chinese population in north Italy went back and forth to infected areas of China during the Chinese New Year. - When they came back there were many “patient 0’s” in the region. - Because of this, numerous exponential functions were set off at the same time. - Because of the closeness of Italian culture the virus had the necessary engine to propagate. It’s not Italy’s fault. They got a perfect storm here. They are managing the best they can.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> But Italy is a special case... That's trivially disproved by simply taking JHU daily data of Italy and other countries, and plotting it as date x log(cases). You can see that most Western countries follow the exact same path.
- nemo44x 7y agoWe don’t even know what “cases” really means. So many people have been infected and not tested by this point. It is estimated over 200k have been infected in the USA and have not required medical help or felt symptoms. Italy has had a more rapid and intense breakout coupled with a vulnerable population and social customs that spread things more quickly. I’m not British but their strategy of lock away the weak (old people and other vulnerable) and let the young/healthy take the brunt and burn the virus out is pretty smart. Unless in reinfected of course.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI'm not buying the British strategy. I feel they're trying to do a suicide burn[0][1]. But with insufficient testing coupled with all that's unknown about the virus - including how long the immunity lasts - I don't think they can control the infection rate anywhere near well enough to pull this off. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585289 [1] - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10307/what-is-a-suicide-burn https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10307/what-is-a-su...
- Camillo 7y agoChina had people dying in the streets, but we're now at the point where the quarantine has had effect, so it's successful mitigation. They also initially quarantined only the area of the initial outbreak (Wuhan), and only later expanded lockdown measures to most of the country (covering 800 million people at the peak, IIRC). And of course the quarantine leaked enough that the infection spread to the entire world. But sure, thank you CPC, a model response from a model government.
- vkou 7y ago> And of course the quarantine leaked enough that the infection spread to the entire world. It spread prior to the quarantine being put in place. > at this point it's run its course, so it's successful mitigation Only ~80,000 people out of 11,000,000 in Wuhan were infected. For a disease this contageous, that we don't have herd immunity for, that's hardly 'run its course'.
- lihaciudaniel 7y agoYou underestimate how wrong you can be. Did it count the undetected cases. You're right that's hardly "run its course"
- Camillo 7y agoI'm not saying the quarantine had no effect. What I mean is that there is a time delay between when the quarantine is put in place and when you see the detected infections start decreasing. China is now at that point, but it's like all commenters have suddenly forgotten what happened before.
- Camillo 7y agoTo be honest I don't really want to criticize China here, but rather the slipshod way in which countries are being compared. Wuhan has been in lockdown for almost two months now. Italy's national quarantine is only a week old. The number of detected active infections is delayed with respect to the actual number of infections, so it takes time for the effects of a quarantine to be visible in the data. What is the point of taking two countries at different points in the curve and presenting one as a shining success story and the other as the worst-case scenario?
- jgeerts 7y agoTo be honest, at the start of this epidemic it wasn't that clear how dangerous the virus was or how easily it would spread. First it happened to Wuhan and we all thought that it wouldn't happen to us, then it happened in Italy and we still thought that we would be fine. Thinking that it won't happen to you won't make it go away unfortunately, your country isn't special, if no drastic measures are being taken like full quarantine this will happen to you too. My country is in full lockdown and still a lot of people don't see the gravity of the situation. People dismissing it as less dangerous than influenza are misinformed.
- dnautics 7y agoHow do you measure "less dangerous than influenza"? Honestly I think it is likely in some jurisdictions to be in the final analysis less dangerous (raw population wide deaths over the season) than influenza. But I think it's worth being cautious (and am contributing and setting an example by self-isolating), because there's a small but worrisome chance it's way worse than influenza. Why is this important? Because if knowledge authorities go around talking about severity with scary talking points, and in the end, it doesn't turn out to be so, then we wind up in a "boy who cried wolf" situation next time.
- darkteflon 7y agoThis pretty much describes the approach Japan is taking. We’re special, it doesn’t apply to us, it won’t happen here. Deeply ignorant approach. I’ve got a family - including a mother-in-law with a pre-existing lung condition - to worry about.
- jupp0r 7y agoI agree with the content. I wonder whether the title “Don’t be Italy” still holds. US might be past the point already where Italy was locked down.