Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

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Italy seems to have been a bit blindsided by the fact that it's home to a rather large semi-legal Chinese population [0], to a point where there were direct flights between Rome and Wuhan prior to the Italian government shutting down air-travel to China [1].

The German response has been rather decent, freeing up lab capacities and using private labs to scale up already solid diagnostics capabilities, which helps prevent cases from going terminal. [2]

As somebody working in German healthcare, outpatient care to be specific, we've already seen hospitals free up beds, by releasing non-priority patients to ambulative home-care around 2 weeks ago.

Starting this week schools will remain closed, Germany is going into lock-down with limited border travel and offering companies "unlimited loans" [3] to get through the resulting economic downturn.

[0] https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/fir...

[1] https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/italy-suspends-visa-is...

[2] https://apnews.com/ad9a6af47c3b55fd83080c9168afaaf4

[3] https://www.businessinsider.de/international/coronavirus-ger...

Chinese links didn't matter. Patient-0 in Europe was tracked to Germany in January. The most affected Italian areas do not have a particularly large official or unofficial Chinese population - but have massive economic and social links with Germany. The areas where the Chinese concentrate, like the Prato mentioned in your first source, saw no cases - they all voluntarily self-quarantined as soon as the emergency exploded in Wuhan, and kept that discipline going.

Italy simply pays the price of a very elderly and weak population, coupled with a decades-long shrinking of public healthcare. Even in Lombardia, one of the best regions for healthcare, intensive-care units in public hospitals were instructed "in peace time" to run close to capacity as much as possible, in order cut beds and save money. This is how we ended up with less than a third of the capacity of Germany, and when shit hit the fan, it wasn't enough.

(Also, Germany is kinda fudging the numbers. They don't record deaths as Covid-related unless covid was absolutely the only health issue a patient experienced. That's not how victims are recorded in most other countries.)

> (Also, Germany is kinda fudging the numbers. They don't record deaths as Covid-related unless covid was absolutely the only health issue a patient experienced. That's not how victims are recorded in most other countries.)

That's not just fudging that's outright misleading, any source for this ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22589306

Looking at German news, most reported deaths are reported as having prior complications or having died of other related illnesses, so the blanked statement about "don't record deaths" is clearly not true. If you have sources that it's happening partially, I'd be interested in those though.

They could be reporting those on the news and omitting them from the officially reported data, but this really wouldn't befit Germany.

It was reported in Italy (obviously in Italian) https://twitter.com/Paolo_Tumolo/status/1237018245552582657/...

There are other reports of hundreds of deaths that were simply not tested for the virus, whereas in Italy they've tested pretty much every death since the outbreak in February. Considering that Patient-0 was infected at the end of January, the theory that there might be some under-reporting going on is not unrealistic. Germany probably just had the capacity to deal with this "under the radar" for longer than Italy.

This is hardly unique to Germany, btw - each country has adopted different methods to test and report, it will likely take time to get some decent convergence at European level.

Cases slipping under the radar, sure, I expect that's happened everywhere to varying degree. But also quite different from not reporting someone that's known to be infected "unless covid was absolutely the only health issue a patient experienced".

> It was reported in Italy (obviously in Italian) https://twitter.com/Paolo_Tumolo/status/1237018245552582657/....

First: I hate twitter.

Second: in a follow up he seems to say (using google translate):

> It is EXACTLY what I meant: they charge the deaths to other pathologies present. I don't see many other possible explanations.

So he doesn't have proof or even a statistic to point to? He just doesn't see an alternative explanation? Is the newspaper he is working for yellow press?

> Patient-0 in Europe was tracked to Germany in January.

At the end of January, was then promptly isolated and all the contacts informed, also afaik didn't have any history of traveling to Italy [0]. At that point, there were still direct flies going from Wuhan to Italy, as those were only stopped after the German case was discovered.

That's why the first positive hit in Italy were two Chinese tourists, on 31 January, who had been in Milan since 23 January [1].

There are 2 countries and several hundred kilometers between the Bavarian January case, and Codogno and Veneto. While those two countries between, Switzerland, and Austria, only started reporting cases late February, a month later.

So I don't really ascribe to the idea that COVID-19 came to Italy trough Germany, it probably came there by multiple channels, such is the problem with a pandemic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_G...

[1] https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_gennaio_30/coronavirus-i...

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