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How Europe sleepwalked into the coronavirus crisis
- jansan 7y agoWhat I would like to know: Given the huge number of infected health workers, are ffp2/ffp3 masks with valve still commonly used in hospitals?
- Arnt 7y agoI think you mean: In institutions where health care workers work, which is much more than hospitals. Many of them work in practices or in various kinds of nursing homes. The masks you may see often in an ICU aren't ones you'll see often in a nursing home or a physiotherapist practice.
- DoingIsLearning 7y agoI think specifically in Spain, there were a particularly high infection rate of frontline hospital staff. Spain like the majority of European countries does not have issues like lack of staff training or not following state-of-the-art protocols. So it begs the question, are the infection control protocols that we currently have, safe enough to deal with this virus? An interesting case-study is Cotugno Hospital, an infectious disease hospital in Naples, Italy. It has so far reported zero staff infections. Perhaps their 'over-the-top' protocol is what is required for all Hospitals when dealing with SARS-COV2?
- Arnt 7y agoThis virus is a strange one. Apparently there's no single symptom that affects even a small majority of the infected patients. That's a strange, unusual problem to handle for a system that assumes that illnesses make people ill. A hospital is self-selecting, in that it doesn't have 50% patients that feel well and show no symptoms. The people who work at a hospital take the precautions that are considered appropriate for the disease they've diagnosed. This means that to some degree, they're not ambushed by asymptomatic infected people.
- jansan 7y agoWhat I actually mean is if the standard protocol currently used in hospitals sees the health care workers as potential source of infections or only as potential infection targets.
- Arnt 7y agoThere are routine protocols to keep health care workers from infecting patients. This is common, because the problem is a very common one. The stuff that lives on a healthy nurses's hands may do no damage there, but would do terrible damage if it could invade a patient who's weak from yesterday's operation. The same applies to the common cold, to whatever the nurse may have picked up while treating another patient half an hour ago, and many, many other varieties of the same hygiene problem.
- s9w 7y ago>Italy, where 12,428 people have now died from COVID-19 with, not from edit: First downvote after less than 10 seconds, and now [flagged] and will get -4'd. Be proud.
- niceworkbuddy 7y agoI think you are right, however prepositions are quite tricky for those whom English language is not mother tongue. In Polish we could say "on": eg. "12,428 people have now died on COVID-19".
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI don't think that was GP's point. "From" seems absolutely correct. Using "with" would mean that the number refers to people who died while having COVID-19; using "from" means COVID-19 was the cause of death.
- s_dev 7y agoCan you not attribute a death to a disease? Covid19 is the name of the disease not the virus.
- s9w 7y agoBut we don't know if covid19 was the main cause of death
- mantap 7y agoSure you could have COVID-19 and then get hit by a car, but in almost all cases pneumonia from COVID-19 is the acute cause of death even if they have some other chronic health problems.
- s9w 7y agoWhy would you assume that? There was a comorbidity study from Italy that did not hint at that at all.
- kasperni 7y agoThere is a huge difference countries in between in Europe. On one hand, you have Spain/Italy and on another, you have Denmark which is starting to plan a controlled opening in the coming weeks [1]. Denmark being the second European country to impose lockdown after Italy. But did so much earlier in the curve than Italy. Going forward it will be very interesting to compare the 3 Scandinavian countries Denmark/Norway and Sweden. Very similar countries cultural, political, and economical but have chosen two very different paths. With Sweden being the last European country holding out against lockdown. Edit: While the countries have very different population/area ratio their capitals Copenhagen/Oslo/Stockholm are comparable. And I'm not only talking about the actual number of cases/deaths. But also how the economy is going to be effected in the long run. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-denmark/denmark-eyes-gradual-reopening-after-easter-if-coronavirus-numbers-stabilize-idUSKBN21H2LY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-denmar...
- Shivetya 7y agoWhen comparing responses of each nation we really out to give consideration to the population of each as well as the land area. When one nation has less population that a large city in another there really is no good comparison.
- chosenbreed37 7y agoIt might also be the case the the Italy (the north in particular) suffered from a larger influx of people with the virus from China or elsewhere to begin with. This means that they're starting with a significant handicap. I think this also adds to the difficulties of direct comparisons between countries.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paganel 7y ago> But did so much earlier in the curve than Italy. Things could have been better for Italy if they had imposed a total lockdown a little earlier for the Bergamo industrial region. The fact is that the industrialists in that area were against it and nothing happened, apart from the whole region of Lombardy being put in a looser lockdown a few days after things had started going bad in the Bergamo region. That "helped" the virus spread around Bergamo and in the whole province of Lombardy, so that Bergamo together with neighbouring Brescia were the most heavily hit regions both in number of cases and deaths. Denmark had it "easier", so to speak, because if you lockdown Copenhagen I guess you've already lockdown-ed half of the country already. This is an article in Italian [1] about what went wrong in the Bergamo industrial region. [1] https://www.ilpost.it/2020/04/01/disastro-alzano-lombardo-nembro/ https://www.ilpost.it/2020/04/01/disastro-alzano-lombardo-ne...
- throwaway207428 7y agoYou mean: how Europe & USA sleepwalked into the coronavirus crisis.
- swebs 7y agoThis article doesn't mention the USA at all. Actually read the article. It is explaining how things happened, rather than just accusations.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoI guess "why" is the interesting question. This article shows that they sleepwalked into it, describing some of the events or documents that accompanied that. But it doesn't actually say why. After there were more than a dozen cases discovered at one workplace in Bavaria, a consequence of one apparently healthy woman travelling from China to a training session, it is incredible that they didn't say "this is a highly contagious disease and given its consequences in China, we must be prepared" instead they said "we're prepared". But why? What motivated the collective dropping of the ball? A commenter says of Denmark above, that they did well. But again, Denmark responded late - they locked down after Italy when coronavirus was spreading like hotcakes in Europe. It's just that they seem to have been lucky that it wasn't spreading in Denmark before they acted. In February it seems like all governments were saying "We'll be fine, nothing to worry about". Why did Europe drop the ball? Are there lockdowns in China regularly that I'm not aware of, so this was a case of the boy crying wolf? Did the WHO need to say "this is a pandemic" before anyone was prepared to take it seriously?
- Juliate 7y agoSo, the short story here would be: EU proposed to help & coordinate action but individual governments failed to acknowledge/assess how unprepared they were (going to be), as they did not assess the threat properly. And their joint reports provided a false sense of security to the whole. That there's a deep coordination/collaboration failure here is clear. But how could several many governments/states all assess that much wrongly on their own capacity to face the epidemics?
- b0rsuk 7y agoChina did its best to keep the epidemic secret for at least several weeks, while buying medical supplies from Europe and other areas, draining them of their own reserves.
- jhanschoo 7y agoSure, peddle a conspiracy rather than incompetence in the face of a new outbreak that when it started nobody knew how serious it was going to be.
- b0rsuk 7y agoIt was both malice on the part of Chinese and incompetence of Europeans. But the punchline is the contrast between the hyper-competent, serious image of US healthcare in the movie Contagion and how it turned out in practice.
- threw234234 7y agoMost cases here in India are from Europe, the Middle East, and the US. These self-conceited nations really screwed us over in India (and now the idiots here are spreading it via Mosques). Gee! Thanks guys! Great work! Amusingly reddit is full of whining pricks from these very countries who were salivating at the possibility of millions dying here. Now, whatsmore, dim-witted Indians, being the loyal slaves of the Anglo-Saxons that they are, are now jumping on the "ChinaVirus" bandwagon of the American wingnuts... The world really is an Orwellian cesspit.
- Merrill 7y agoThe root cause failure was not complacency about medical supplies. The root cause failure was complacency about the contagiousness and mortality rate and the failure to contain Covid-19 to China by stopping all international travel.
- Juliate 7y agoContainment at the source should have started at least in early December 2019 to be effective. And even then, that would likely not have been effective (because the severity of the epidemic was not asserted widely & seriously enough by then). So the issue is realistically not there.
- kgabis 7y agoSurprisingly former Eastern Bloc countries are doing quite well thanks to early lockdowns. I think it's largely due to people not trusting public health systems.