godspeed to you guys.
Regarding the outbreak in Northern Italy...the fatality rate seems much much higher than South Korea or Germany. Do you have any theories on why the fatalities are so much worse?
Regarding the outbreak in Northern Italy...the fatality rate seems much much higher than South Korea or Germany. Do you have any theories on why the fatalities are so much worse?
For example, there was this anecdote this week about a woman in the US. She believes she's infected, but none of the responsible authorities will let her pass a test unless she's physically been to one of the high-risk countries. So she either self-quarantine or ignore all of it and go to work. The twist is that she's a health practitioner...
Test suppliers who develop test for hospitals and doctors offices are ramping up production as fast as they can, but it will take time.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/testing.html
This site is good for up to date, and fairly detailed numbers about Italy: https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/
They are doing a pretty good job of testing: 4000 yesterday. Oregon, by comparison, has the capacity to test about 40 a day.
Edit: also, they are not being "drastic" enough in Italy.
Scenes from a ski area: https://ladige.it/news/cronaca/2020/03/07/come-previsto-oggi...
Stay home, or if you want to go out, go for a walk in the woods or something, but don't go where it's crowded.
4.2 million, 40 tests per day 60 million, 5700 tests yesterday
This assumes a median of 8 days from onset to death in the lethal cases, and a doubling time of # infections of 4 days, which seems to be around the current level for the world outside of China. The number is very sensitive to average lethality rate, and hence also to the age & health distribution of the population.
It's completely implausible that Italy has only 5000 cases, as people who have visited Italy for their winter holidays have very frequently tested positive after returning home. They haven't all randomly met the same 5000 Italians.
Also suggests you've got a critical / potentially terminal patient occupying an ICU bed for 2 - 3 weeks in the process, which becomes a significant load on your available hospital capacity...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...
I think at this point, it's still very early in the spread of infection and the distribution of infection might not be random and might be clustered around certain locations, social circles etc.
The closest data point we have is likely that South Korean church, where I think they hunted down more or less every member and tested them... Doesn't give you a true view of asymptomatic presence in the general population but does provide a cue about relative size vs. known infected...
That assumes that South Korea did diagnose anyone who got the virus which is unlikely. So the real number might be in hundreds of thousands.
The virus is yet to hit the rest of Europe very hard, though. Italy should be a warning to the other countries of how bad the coronavirus is.
But note that South Korea must inevitably have missed some cases, so assuming the same ratio of diagnosed to serious cases between Italy and SK. So the real number of diseased people in Italy must actually be a little higher.
Anyway other countries such as Switzerland, Sweden or France aren't that behind in terms of cases per million people (Iceland was even ahead of Italy as of yesterday), perhaps 10 days or so. I don't feel like my region is particularly unlucky.
Germany has 700 cases and 0 deaths. Austria has 80 cases and 0 deaths...both of these countries are adjacent to Northern Italy region, in which 233+ have died.
Saying "no theory needed" frankly raises more questions than provides answers.
When was the 1st case in Germany and when was the 1st case in Italy?
it's ~ 4%