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Comment by iRobbery | Hacker News Reader

Just from the start already i dont get a scientific feeling.

"In just 3 weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, the virus has reached more than 10.000 infected people."

Does this mean only tested 10.000 people? Reads a bit odd though too, i assume they were not infected already when the virus reached them?

"From our data, about 10% of patients require ICU (Intensive Care Unit) or sub ICU assistance and about 5% of patients die."

Is this from 10% of the people actually going to the hospital, or 10% of all tested, or 10% of all people that got the virus?

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Who cares. The point is to get people out of their comfortable complacency.

Read this one: "We are now in the tragic situation that the most efficient health system of the richest area of the country (Lombardy) is almost at its full capacity and will soon be difficult to assist more people with Covid-19."

I care. These doom and gloom shrieks and exhortations for President Madagascar to Shut. Down. Everything are distracting from the real work governments have to do to tackle this severe and protracted crisis in a competent manner, i.e. following the advice of real, not collective-letter experts.

The advise from real experts is also to shut everything down.

No. It is to flatten the curve, i.e. to get infected slowly and manageably, in order to minimize peak ICU admissions. This will minimize deaths. If you fuck up initially, like China and Italy, by severely underestimating the problem, you're forced to shut down everything for a bit, but in the end everyone will be doing the same thing - shutting down some things to control the infection, not try in vain to "stop" it.

Best to shut down now and flatten as much as possible, no?

>Does this mean only tested 10000 people?

Italian health services have tested more than 50k people (the number of tests is over 60k but some people got tested more than once). More than 12k were infected. This is likely to be an underestimate, since we know a lot of infections are asymptomatic.

> 10% of all people that got the virus?

This one. FTR, there's an additional 5% from this 10%, IIRC, which experiences multi-organ failure and dies within a few days.

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