Report on the characteristics of Covid-19 positive deceased patients in Italy [pdf]

Particularly in northern Italy, which is heavily industrialized.

From what I understand about Italian culture, they kind of are. Older Italians seem to have much stronger social lives than in the US.

My guess is that they try to avoid an additional bacterial super infection with antibiotics. Also these antivirals can be dangerous to (very) old people. I think because of liver malfunctions. But take all I say with a grain of salt.. this is all stuff in the back off my head that I remember vaguely from my father (a doctor).

> The figure 5 shows, for the patients who died positive COVID-19, the median time in days, who spend from onset of symptoms to death (8 days), from onset of symptoms to hospitalization (4 days) and from hospitalization to death (4 days).

At this point, we know the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions are dying fast; it is also not unreasonable to think they're more vulnerable overall.

But not enough time has passed to say yet whether younger people without pre-existing conditions are not particularly susceptible or are just a little less susceptible but take longer to succumb. If the statistics are a week for someone over 65, from onset to death, and a month for someone under 40 w/o pre-existing conditions, it's going to skew the hell out of the statistics this early in the outbreak.

Ha. Italians in N. Italy often living multigeneration in close quarters. Spanish and italians, men and women, ritually kiss on the cheeks as a greeting. Brits and Germans don't so much.

Italians are very social to an old age and live longer than many nations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

> We estimated excess deaths of 7,027, 20,259, 15,801 and 24,981 attributable to influenza epidemics in the 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17

Italy always has this problem

I was wondering the same thing, but judging by my own country crowds of elderly people is a thing. For example they do not use technology as much as others and tend to concentrate in places that provide alternative means to function without technology.

Another assumption is that touching surfaces is not how the virus spreads. Being within a few meters of carriers, not necessarily coughing, just talking and breathing, is how people catch it. And since masks are not available and dumb propaganda discourages people from using even a piece of clothing to protect them from inhaling droplets, people catch the virus so easily.

Because a bunch of these patients are people with suspected, not confirmed, covid-19 and so they're treating pneumonia which they think is probably bacterial but possibly viral.

Also, they were thinking that covid-19 in already vulnerable people was damaging the lungs and making bacterial pneumonia much more likely, so they were treating preventatively.

> yet alone having younger asymptomatic carriers cough on them.

Droplets in the air are one route of transmission, but there are others. It's likely that most people are not infected via this route, but via fomites. Infected people cough onto a surface, and later someone touches that surface and then their face.

On antibiotics, aside from secondary infections, there’s a paper out talking about azithromycin: “Our preliminary results also suggest a synergistic effect of the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Azithromycin has been shown to be active in vitro against Zika and Ebola viruses [20-22] and to prevent severe respiratory tract infections when administrated to patients suffering viral infection [23].”

Not sure of they used azithromycin but would’ve been good to see that verified.

24% smoke in Italy

Aka super carriers.

The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting as many as possible. Eventually, the more infected, the more that will die. The young are just carrier pigeons and don’t even know it.

Before concluding that they contribute, the next question should be, how many people in that population at that age have ZERO comorbid diseases? Likely, it's very few. So these comorbidities may actually have little causal role leading to mortality. We can't know from just this data.

Until we learn more, we can't conclude 1) that comorbidities were causal, or 2) WHICH comorbidity really matters.

Not good for the US given the high obesity / diabetes rates here.

Over here they only test people who are "very sick", in other words people who need medical attention. They are not testing people with no or "mild" symptoms. Basically this means if you don't feel like you're about to die, you're not tested and therefore you're not counted.

So to answer your question, they're actually not measuring enough.

As we don't know yet of the long term effects, please don't take that lightly!