4 ms·

Italy extends lockdown amid hopes of turning corner

46 points by fspeech 7y ago

stopwetmarkets 7y ago
Expect to see more outbreaks and lockdowns in the future, as China has already quietly reopened its wet markets, and unbelievably, they've even resumed selling bats: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-markets-selling-bats.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar... The article also features photos of cages stuffed with cats and dogs waiting to be slowly tortured to death with blowtorches (many Chinese believe the more the animal suffers before death, the better the meat will taste) NSFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgMmAFN2rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgMmAFN2rs
- guacamole4 7y ago
  China's official position is that virus was brought to China by US military rather than originating in a wet market. Hence they have to reopen them or otherwise admit that the wet markets were the actual source.
- rhacker 7y ago
  The longer I live, the more I believe that humanity is pure evil.
  - dang 7y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- DesiLurker 7y ago
  WTF is wrong with these people, seriously! Why? Don't watch the video.
- kilpikaarna 7y ago
  Nice username. It pays to be aware of the geopolitical games afoot. The Daily Mail seems like its very much the spearhead of an op to deflect blame from the UK/US elite and pin the blame on China.
  - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    Why not both?
- FriendlyNormie 7y ago
  The only microbiology research lab in China focused on advanced viruses is in Wuhan. Please... let’s stop pretending this came from a bat.
  - obmelvin 7y ago
    So what? I'm sure if we knew more about you we could make plenty of 'suspicious assertions' about various parts of your life. The fact is that there is no credible evidence that it came from that lab.
  - eesmith 7y ago
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 - "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. ... Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.""
    - FriendlyNormie 7y ago
      The only way their dimwitted hot take would be remotely credible is if they were aware of the exact activities of the scientists at the lab in Wuhan and knew exactly which cutting edge technologies they had access to. The only people who would know this are high level intelligence agents who would not be revealing their classified knowledge on a nature.com blog post. It’s not like it’s impossible to selectively breed a stronger virus through conventional methods when you have a lot of prisoners with no human rights to use as bodies to throw at the problem. This lab was specifically focused on handling coronaviruses. Again, the only one in China. It’s 300 meters from the seafood market. The 300 meter radius circle surrounding the lab is 0.33 square miles. China is 3705000 square miles. The chances of this happening so close to the lab is therefore 1 in 11.2 million, roughly the odds of winning a lottery jackpot.
carlob 7y ago
I'm not an epidemiologist, but I have some background in Bayesian problems in biophysics. Some back of the envelope math for Lombardy, the hardest hit region: Total population ~ 10M Total deaths (2020/3/30) = 4773 If one assumes an Infection Fatality Rate of 1% then we would have had 500k cases in the region about two weeks ago. Assuming a doubling of the cases every 5 days, this means that the current actual number of infections stands at 4M and it would take log2(10/4) = 1.3 new doublings to reach saturation: about a week. Taking instead an IFR of 2% and doubling every 7 weeks, we'd have about 3 weeks left to herd immunity. Of course one should take into account the fact that at some point this will stop behaving like an exponential and look more like a sigmoid, but herd immunity doesn't need 100% infection, so the orders of magnitude involved should be more or less the same. This seems to be roughly consistent with what some more authoritative sources are saying for example [0] claims Italy is probably missing 95% of cases. [0] https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_estimates.html https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_e...
- bestouff 7y ago
  I think it's past time to introduce "IANAE".

46 points by fspeech 7y ago

Expect to see more outbreaks and lockdowns in the future, as China has already quietly reopened its wet markets, and unbelievably, they've even resumed selling bats: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-markets-selling-bats.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar... The article also features photos of cages stuffed with cats and dogs waiting to be slowly tortured to death with blowtorches (many Chinese believe the more the animal suffers before death, the better the meat will taste) NSFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgMmAFN2rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgMmAFN2rs

guacamole4 7y ago
China's official position is that virus was brought to China by US military rather than originating in a wet market. Hence they have to reopen them or otherwise admit that the wet markets were the actual source.
rhacker 7y ago
The longer I live, the more I believe that humanity is pure evil.
- dang 7y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
DesiLurker 7y ago
WTF is wrong with these people, seriously! Why? Don't watch the video.
kilpikaarna 7y ago
Nice username. It pays to be aware of the geopolitical games afoot. The Daily Mail seems like its very much the spearhead of an op to deflect blame from the UK/US elite and pin the blame on China.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Why not both?
FriendlyNormie 7y ago
The only microbiology research lab in China focused on advanced viruses is in Wuhan. Please... let’s stop pretending this came from a bat.
- obmelvin 7y ago
  So what? I'm sure if we knew more about you we could make plenty of 'suspicious assertions' about various parts of your life. The fact is that there is no credible evidence that it came from that lab.
- eesmith 7y ago
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 - "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. ... Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.""
  - FriendlyNormie 7y ago
    The only way their dimwitted hot take would be remotely credible is if they were aware of the exact activities of the scientists at the lab in Wuhan and knew exactly which cutting edge technologies they had access to. The only people who would know this are high level intelligence agents who would not be revealing their classified knowledge on a nature.com blog post. It’s not like it’s impossible to selectively breed a stronger virus through conventional methods when you have a lot of prisoners with no human rights to use as bodies to throw at the problem. This lab was specifically focused on handling coronaviruses. Again, the only one in China. It’s 300 meters from the seafood market. The 300 meter radius circle surrounding the lab is 0.33 square miles. China is 3705000 square miles. The chances of this happening so close to the lab is therefore 1 in 11.2 million, roughly the odds of winning a lottery jackpot.

carlob 7y ago

I'm not an epidemiologist, but I have some background in Bayesian problems in biophysics. Some back of the envelope math for Lombardy, the hardest hit region: Total population ~ 10M Total deaths (2020/3/30) = 4773 If one assumes an Infection Fatality Rate of 1% then we would have had 500k cases in the region about two weeks ago. Assuming a doubling of the cases every 5 days, this means that the current actual number of infections stands at 4M and it would take log2(10/4) = 1.3 new doublings to reach saturation: about a week. Taking instead an IFR of 2% and doubling every 7 weeks, we'd have about 3 weeks left to herd immunity. Of course one should take into account the fact that at some point this will stop behaving like an exponential and look more like a sigmoid, but herd immunity doesn't need 100% infection, so the orders of magnitude involved should be more or less the same. This seems to be roughly consistent with what some more authoritative sources are saying for example [0] claims Italy is probably missing 95% of cases. [0] https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_estimates.html https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_e...

bestouff 7y ago
I think it's past time to introduce "IANAE".