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Comment by alfyboy | Hacker News Reader

For anybody living in quarantined areas of Italy. How much has your daily life been affected?

Lockdown in Italy is a concept that is difficult to enforce. And it's probably very different to what it means in China or even just South Korea or any other more organised and centrally governed country in Europe like France. But in essence: Schools are closed until next month. People can still move around freely for work reasons, and in general people still work in offices. Bars and restaurants close after 18pm. Shops are closed only on weekends. People over 65 have free deliveries from most supermarkets, but very few use them. Big groups of people are not allowed outside public places. The social structure in Italy is still very much based on families, so people will remain with their close relatives and go out for a walk around home.

Completely random and off-topic. I'm in the US and used to 12-hour time. I personally prefer 24-hour time, and am comfortable with 18:00 or similar for a time indicator. I don't know that I've ever seen a 24-hour time with am/pm attached to it. Is this common?

not at all, it just seems a misprint / little error

No, at least not in Italy. In fact, I don't think it makes any sense.

Just a bit of redundancy, to compensate USA Covid-19 tests.

You're right. My mistake.

To feed off your random comment, I live in the US as well but switched all of my clocks (that I was able to) over to 24-hour time a few years ago. It just makes more sense to me. But everybody around me thinks I'm some sort of weirdo for it.

I've got a handful of software (Skype, my ereader) that don't have 24h time options. Super annoying, especially for software where all they'd have to do is use the OS time convention.

I've found that a lot of software that moved to Electron or similar solutions has trouble adhering to OS settings. Heck, even Chrome ignores my date format in the history tag. That's what you get with a technology that's not really supposed to interact with the user's OS settings much.

I switched everything I could to C, km, 24 hour time, and YYYY-MM-DD. US social conventions around measurements are just obtuse.

Thank you.

How else would you distinguish e.g. 18 in the morning or 18 in the evening if you can't say 18am and 18pm.

I say 6pm but write 18:00. I imagine things like that can very easily lead to awkward translations.

I've found countries (Slovakia springs to mind) that would say "a quarter of 8" for 7:15 (think "7 hours and a quarter of the eighth hour") and "half 8" for 7:30. Time can translate in rather interesting ways.

In Russian at least, a closer translation would be “half of 8th” because it means something like “half of the 8th hour [has passed].”

it's a gesture for the americans probably. you start typing 18:00 and realize that US people will want to know if it's pm.

I have been reviewing the situation with a colleague of mine, and we have now realized that the new measures are not enough. It makes no sense to allow burger king or any bar to stay open util 6 p.m. And it makes no sense to allow to go to work for any undeferrable (or also deferrable) reason. The only effective measure seems logically to be quarantine, and for me and my family (2+2), from tomorrow afternoon quarantine will be. The government will finally arrive to the same conclusion, but a later stage. At the moment they seem to be still trying to balance the counteracting of the epidemic and the economic damage, but to us that's not the correct thing to do.

I believe it's largely political posturing at this point in every country.

It's being modelled and shaping policies. It makes no sense to try to stop it, cease all activity. That's too late, difficult and costly. But it makes sense to delay and spread it over time. So measures need to be, imperfect.

I can see the sense in slowing the spread to help the medical system cope.

The problem with this is that a 14 day total economic halt will be devastating. Even assuming all office workers work remote basic social structure will be endangered. The hospitals need to stay open, people need to keep operating water and electricity utilities, food distribution needs to continue as many do not have 14 days of stock at home.

It is not about those dams politician that only care about reelection numbers, it also about keeping the wheel of society turning.

To say nothing of how much total hysteria that would cause.

Quarantine for everything but the very bare minimum services (the ones you mention but the food which can be distributed home to home) seems the only logical path to the resolution of the matter. The spread of the virus caused by a relaxed quarantine (as the one enforced now, based on people good will) will certainly cause the collapse of the system you are describing due to the saturation of the hospitals. During tonight's news, journalist Mentana showed graphs describing a significant decrease in contagion in the Lodi and Codogno areas, i.e. in those areas where the most drastic measures have been taken. In order to have a functioning economy, I believe it is necessary to have a population and not just what remains of it.

To my understanding now there is little hope to "stop" the virus in geographical terms; to avoid collapse it would be enough for it to spread slow enough.

In China we have been on economic halt since late January. The hospitals stay open, utilities are running, food deliveries, all of that is still working. There is no shortage of food or other daily products.

What has changed is that almost everything is being delivered from online store or purchased from supermarket or pharmacy during restricted hours. Anybody who worked a pink collar job before has no job now. Anybody who owned a brick and mortar business before is hoping that the government grants will cover the rent and allow it to reopen if/when things finally go back to normal.

Lockdown like this is no doubt devastating to the economy. I don't think we've seen the worst of it yet. But so far it hasn't affected supply of food, clothing, shelter.

I think how devastating it is depends on whether the government will just step in to make things whole or not. Seriously the government could just tell payroll companies to cut checks as normal and put it on the treasuries dime. They could just declare debt holidays.

Probably means people and businesses in places like China will be mostly 'fine' and people in the US are going to get savaged.

Hospitals in China have been cancelling all elective surgeries and sending the majority of their in-patient home. This was done partly due to the fears of the virus but also because a large part of irregular staff (nurse assistants contractors, medical students and registrars) were away and unable to work. Bear in mind the outbreak happened in late winter when most hospitals would run at near capacity anyway and there is no way to avoid the loss of life.

I agree that we have not fully realised the effect of the lockdown yet, but from what I have gathered things are not very promising. It's unlikely that people will ever go without food or shelter, however the economic progress they worked hard to achieve in the past decade could very easily be undone.

The recommended isolation period might not be a mere 14 days for much longer.

"According to the official Weibo news of the "News 1 + 1" column of CCTV, on March 6, Bai Yansong talked with Wu Hao, the head of the community prevention and control expert group of the central steering group.

"Wu Hao said: Patients discharged from Wuhan must have 14 days of centralized isolation observation and 14 days of home medical isolation observation, and they must go through a total of 28 days of isolation observation period. The first 14 days are the observations of centralized medical isolation points, which are usually requisitioned and modified medical isolation points such as hotels or training schools for observation. In principle, each isolation point is matched by a doctor and a nurse for every 50 people, and there are other life support personnel. At the same time, there is a division-level leader cadre at the isolation point."[1][2]

Also, when it comes to trying to squash the epidemic nation-wide, even 28 days might not be enough, as you have to reset the clock with every new infection.

Let me give an example. Let's say everyone in Italy isolates themselves (with their families or whoever they're living with) for 14 days. At day 13, someone of them that's infected could infect someone else they're living with, and if they then go out in to society on day 14 they can start the epidemic all over again.

Of course, if this was perfect isolation, with every single individual keeping completely away from every other individual, then 14 days (or 28 days) might be enough (assuming no atypical cases that take longer to resolve). But that's not going to happen in the real world.

People will need to have some contact for getting food from each other, for example, and for keeping essential utilities like water and electricity running, for keeping hospitals open, etc. That's not to mention group living facilities like nursing homes and prisons. There are just not enough individual living accommodations to make perfect isolation possible.

Worse, even if there was perfect isolation in Italy, when the isolation period ends the epidemic could still start all over again when one single sick person from another country enters.

In order to be really effective, such isolation measures would have to be both perfect and simultaneously held all over the world, or else once a country is clear of the disease it would have to somehow prevent sick people from other countries from entering, which isn't going to happen either.

[1] - http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2020/03/06/700265.html

[2] - https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/feql65/wuhan_i...

What does this quarantine mean for you? Are you not leaving the house/flat at all?

writing from Pavia(Lombardia), 15 min of drive from the city where the first cases have developed. There is less people on the street but still too many people conducting normal life, taking public transport or having drinks etc in crowded places. These new measures are meant to force to change lifestyle and be more conscious of the risks. Daily life has changed in that you stay at home, work at home,think twice every time you need to go to the store: do I really need it? It's a possible vehicle of contagion, do I really need to get out? Being stuck at home is not easy but neighter as easy nor as terrible as some would think: it simply has to be done.

Italian here: not really a lockdown, we can go to work and the country discovered remote working. Supermarkets are open, pharmacies too. No shortage of goods except surgical masks

N.italy, all ok. Less people around, shops ok: i withdraw cash every day, rather than waiting for the gov to do it for me. Which they will, then they'll find a away [o line their pockets with it. Nb never voted, never will, but italians are already being political about this. Seen a few comments here, too. The real impact will be when the rest of eu gets hit. At least day2day italians know you can't blame any single person/ location as you don't know how you'll get infected.

If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain.

It's hard or impossible to meet with friends, especially if living in distant places. Think living before cars.

No dinners at restaurants. Probably no take aways after 6 pm. Dinner is usually at 8 or 9 pm here.

It's difficult to practice sports, except running or whatever you can do at home.

Everything else is normal. I already worked from home, self employed.

Developer here, we now work in separate rooms in the office. Gotta work remotely if someone gets infected I guess. My train to work is 10% the usual people. Social life is voip only now. Groceries are still easy to get, even If there's 3x the people at the queues. People with children have to work from home if they can, schools are closed

So far, nothing has changed except there's less and less people in the streets. Tomorrow I'm commuting to work as usual.

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