It's worked elsewhere so there is good reason to hope that it will work in Italy as well. It sucks that we have to wait five days to find out though. What I wouldn't give for a crystal ball right now.
No country is implementing measures nearly as extreme as China, so they won't be as successful in slowing down the epidemic.
Before someone mentions South Korea: Korean CDC explained their epidemic curve is bending because they are finishing testing the 200,000 sect members at the center of the epidemic. So fewer tests = fewer detected infections: "in Daegu and Gyeongbuk region, the transmission seems a bit slow down as testing Shincheonji members is almost finished" Source: https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=00... In other words this is NOT a sign Korea is succeeding at containing it. I have seen zero epidemiologists correctly report on this. They all fail to read what KCDC is saying.
It's outrageous to me that you are still commenting on this after so many people here debunked you (and were thoroughly proven right by now) when you were claiming apocalyptic CFR numbers.
There seems to be some missing context here. What are you talking about?
"so many people here debunked you"
I was criticized, but the criticism was invalid. My estimates turned out correct according to published studies (note that the high CFR >9% is not the same as the IFR which takes into account underascertainment and is lower around 0.5-1.6%):
A CFR of 18% was estimated by https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
A CFR of 33% was estimated by https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an...
A CFR of 5.3 or 8.4% (depending on two scenarios) was estimated by https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/523
(These reports have been quoted by the WHO in situation report 30 (references 10, 11 and 12) and report 31: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... and https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... )
For reference I have always claimed a WIDE range for the CFR: between 9% and 56% (see https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/) So two of the three studies support me, and the third one is slightly outside my range (with one scenario where they calculated 8.4% being close to my lower bound of 9%.)
Note that these are NOT "apocalyptic estimates", as these three published estimates and my estimate only claim to be valid for one particular case: the CFR (1) for China, (2) as of January/early February, (3) not accounting for underreporting of cases. The CFR does change significantly over time, depending on countries, and depending on the ascertainment rate. The biggest factor is underascertainment, and if we correct for this in China, we calculate a much lower fatality closer to 0.5-1.6%, we call this the Infection Fatality Ratio (IFR). See the last section in my blog post "Updates & Validation": https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/#updates--...
Perhaps you thought or assumed I was calculating the IFR, not CFR.
Re South Korea: You are presenting a hypothesis as fact. For lots of reasons the hypothesis appears unlikely. Time will tell, but I'm confident you'll be proven wrong again, if I see another comment by you then I'll gladly point it out.
Why are you doing this? I think that's a question for yourself...
So ALL(!) the studies referenced in WHO situation reports are "incorrect"? The WHO couldn't/didn't find any other studies that were "correct"? Don't you think it is a little improbable that 4 entities (WHO + 3 teams behind the 3 studies) are all wrong?
You say the CFR is nowhere in the range but that's because you, like all media, look at the so-called naïve CFR (deaths/cases) which is known to severely underestimate the true CFR in the initial rapid growth phase of an epidemic, because deaths lag cases. The naïve CFR gives accurate results only when calculated across a cohort of patients who all either recovered or died, with none left hospitalized. Epidemiologists are very aware of this bias; my post at https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/ covers this topic and presents various links including 4-5 peer-reviewed papers documenting it. This bias is why none of the proper CFR estimates employ the naïve CFR calculation.
Also you need to be aware that CFR evolves over time. Initially the most severe cases are the ones that are detected first, so CFR among these initial cohorts is higher.
In fact the high CFR is confirmed by observations of these cohorts. For example 11 of the first 99 patients died[1]. That's a CFR of 11% right there. And some of these patients were still hospitalized at the time of publication, some additional ones may have died since then.
My CFR estimate and the 3 studies referenced by the WHO were all based on such early data when the detected cases were more severe. If we were to redo the estimate today with current data from China, we would find a lower CFR because today they can run many more lab tests on larger swath of population so they detect a larger proportion of mild cases.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Re CFR: If you are allowed to cherry pick a narrowly defined set of cases, you can make this value look any way you want. If that's the argument you are retreating to, you simply have nothing to say, because it is grossly misleading.
Re South Korea: numbers of people tested is on a stable exponential trajectory since the very beginning, unaffected by how many church members are tested. The exponential growth factor for the number of confirmed cases has been stably decaying since the very beginning. There is simply nothing to indicate that the artifact you suggest exists, yet you take a single sentence you found online to claim South Korean growth isn't actually slowing. What the fuck dude?
The most detailed analysis of Chinese(!) CFR numbers I am aware of, including discussions of all the issues that mrb likes to quote to sow confusion: Riou et al. [0]
Cumulative number of tests performed in South Korea: See the table at [1]; ideally plot the "Total Tested" column logarithmically to see sustained exponential growth clearly.
Confirmed cases in South Korea over time [2]. Plot South Korea alone to see the continuous decay (pretty much from day 1 to right now) of the exponential growth rate clearly.
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...
Nothing like this happens in EU or USA :(