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Comment by kasperni | Hacker News Reader

This graph showing how many days other countries are behind Italy's infection rate is quite alarming [1]. Especially the close alignment of most of the countries.

[1] https://ibb.co/gZDfgPy

Edit: Sorry, I didn't include the original source. I had taken a screenshot and couldn't find the original article. But the original data is from Mark J Handley [2] who is (non-medical) Professor of Networked Systems and part-time Roboticist at UCL. And the article I took the picture from is at [3] (I don't normally read the Daily Mail, I promise).

[2] https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112

[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8095299/Man-under...

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The bit of good news which isn't entirely clear from a log-scale chart of total number of cases, is that today's number of new cases in Italy is down significantly.

New Cases: [1]

   March 6  - 640
   March 7  - 1145
   March 8  - 2314
   March 9  - 1797
   March 10 - 977

Alternative Data Source: [2]

   March 6  - 640
   March 7  - 1145
   March 8  - 1326
   March 9  - 1598
   March 10 - 529

In perhaps two more days we can say definitively that growth rate has peaked in Italy.

[1] - Direct from daily government reports - e.g. http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/news/p3_2_1_1_1.jsp?lingua=...

[2] - http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Lombardy wasn't counted in yet. Wait for tomorrow update.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fgh9v4/italy_r... and https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fgh9v4/italy_r....

This shows at least some increase from Lombardy...?

http://www.salute.gov.it/imgs/C_17_pagineAree_5351_4_file.pd...

vs. yesterday

http://www.salute.gov.it/imgs/C_17_pagineAree_5351_2_file.pd...

And the day before...

http://www.salute.gov.it/imgs/C_17_pagineAree_5351_0_file.pd...

The drop in new Lombardy cases is precipitous, I agree, we'll know for sure in a couple days.

The comments I quoted say that today's Lombardy update is partial - deaths are counted in, but total cases not yet. That's apparently as of 3-4 hours ago, told in the Italian TV just after the numbers report.

I.e. the first PDF you link doesn't have complete numbers per official government admission.

Meanwhile, back in the real world where data can be noisy:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

There is another page that shows the case numbers by country.

https://mackuba.eu/corona/

A few countries look like they have reached an inflection point (see number of daily new cases going back for example) but that could be a problem of testing (or lack thereof).

If I'm to believe random comments on /r/CoronaVirus by people claiming to be working in healthcare (or related to such people), in Italy, they're not testing everyone in ICUs anymore, as there's little point or time (high prevalence of disease, completely saturated medical system). This implies the number of cases there is going to be underreported.

Also note RE today's Italy stats - they're only partial, Lombardy (i.e. the region with most cases) isn't counted in yet.

Anaesthetist Jason van Schoor from UCL tweeted a rather long chain [1] from his friend in Italy and the situation seems to be indeed very, very bad.

The pressure on the healthcare system from the virus seems to be simply massive and the system cannot keep up nor maintain a level of care for everyone who enters the system.

[1] https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753...

For those who haven't seen it and don't want to read the whole thread (though they should!), the IMO most salient part:

5/ Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are starting to get sick and are emotionally overwhelmed.

6/ My friends call me in tears because they see people dying in front of them and they con only offer some oxygen. Ortho and pathologists are being given a leaflet and sent to see patients on NIV. PLEASE STOP, READ THIS AGAIN AND THINK.

Please update Morocco, as it should be 3 cases and 1 death.

The website is run by someone else. It looks like it was not updated at all today.

They updated it now.

There are still a ton of people who still think that it is just like the flu... Talked to a few people and i basically lost hope that we will handle the right way (until it is too late) i cant wrap my head around it.. Two countries went in lock down... Becuae it is just like the flu? Yeahhhh.... Right.

You're right but it could be people are getting over-reacting and thus causing more panic and more buying. It is more worry some economically speaking than medically.

I totally understand the reaction is totally different from the flu.

Here's my question: If we had real-time dashboards and 24/7 news coverage of every flu case, hospitalization, and flu death... would it look much different? I think it would actually look much worse.

Well, yes? When was the last time a flu DDoSed medical systems of two countries to the point people are routinely refused treatment and die in the ICU corridors?

The WHO estimates that the 2009 H1N1 "swine flu" killed ~250,000. [1]

Reported case mortality of H1N1 during the pandemic was similarly upwards of ~5% in some countries, [2] although later retrospective studies found that H1N1 was actually less lethal than a typical flu season (0.01-0.08%). [3]

ICU utilization was very significant in some countries, e.g. 30 people per million admitted to the ICU [4]. (Italy is currently at 14 per million.)

Hospitals definitely had to adopt "surge management" although in 2009 it often had as much to due with managing fear and panic as it did with getting people access to ventilators. [5]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_in_India

[3] - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...

[4] - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0908481

[5] -https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/136827-the-next-pandemi...

Life Care Center in Washington had 120 residents a week ago. Now 19 of them are dead.[1] Does that sound like "just the flu?"

There's plenty of evidence that this is much worse than the flu. R0 is >2, compared to 1.3. Mortality rate seems to be at least 5x higher. And those are low bounds. And this is all adding to the regular load on hospitals. It has observably overloaded hospital capacity in China and Italy.

[1]: https://www.chron.com/news/education/article/Washington-viru...

Technically it is like a flu but I don't think people realize how bad flus can be. The 1918 one killed about 2.7% of the population which would be 200 million with the present population. Hopefully covid19 won't be that bad.

That's true, but it doesn't take into account the relative population of the various countries.

Also, I'd love to see it broken down by city. I figure my city is at least a week ahead of Seattle.

Relative population doesn't matter at this stage. Relative population density might matter, a little.

Relative population only becomes important once a significant portion of the population is infected. Until that time you'd expect a roughly exponential increases from the original outbreak.

Testing is very limited in many countries. In Switzerland for example, testing is only done for very limited groups of persons with severe and for some medical staff. Broad testing never took place.

Testing in the US is just coming online after everyone started going around the CDC and developed their own tests.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing-covid-19...

Scroll down to the table showing testing rates per million.

   Guangdong China: 2820
   South Korea: 3692
   Italy: 826
   US: 5

Maybe a better metric would be % of ICU utilization.

Do you have a source for this image/the data in this image? It's a great plot, but would like to confirm the veracity.

Here is an ugly chart I made using Johns Hopkins data: https://mobile.twitter.com/fagiolinux/status/123705989830484...

I used logarithmic scale and normalized per million people, so despite the ugliness the exponential growth is quite clear, even in countries with relatively few cases.

It's clear, right there in the data.

https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

I've been plotting this data myself for a few countries in EU over the past days, and the trend is plainly visible.

Steps to reproduce the effect:

1) Load https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/blob/master/csse_... into your favourite data processing package (mine is Excel, here's the PowerQuery for data mangling I did, valid up to yesterday's cases: https://gist.github.com/TeMPOraL/2a26d3a1da551fb818efce87493...),

2) Select Italy and other countries of interest, and plot on a log scale.

Excellently informative graph! I had been meaning to plot something just like it but got distracted by other things. Do you have a source for the data and/or the graph?

Here's the data provided by Johns Hopkins University; they collect WHO and CSSE reports. That's what you see on the popular JHU coronavirus map (though the repository is often few hours behind the map).

https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

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