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joubert

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/italy-elderly-coronavirus/

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https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/italy-elderly-coronavirus/

> Claim: Italy has stopped treating elderly coronavirus patients due to "socialized medicine."

> Rating: Mixture

> What's true: Italian health care workers who are overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases could be faced with decisions about allocating limited life-saving treatment to those with the most likelihood to live longest upon survival.

> What's false: However, Italy hasn't abandoned elderly patients to die. Instead, Italian health care workers, when faced with more patients than available equipment and capacity to treat them, may possibly be forced to prioritize treatment of those with the highest likelihood of surviving long-term.

The egregious (and slimily political) claim that Snopes needs to refute is that this is due to "socialized medicine." It's not, it's really due to a simple lack of capacity.

"Free market medicine" wouldn't do any better, it'd just prioritize the wealthy instead of the young, leaving the poor to get worse (or no) care and potentially die.

As of today it's mostly a fake news. The question "are people dying for lack of ICUs?" is asked each day by journalists during the update from Head of the Civil Protection and the answer up to today is "still not". North Italy (in particular Lombardia) is approaching the limit of available ICUs every day. New ICUs are activated every day and there are daily transfers of patients under ICU from Lombardia to other regions (that still don't suffer from much traffic). Still we can't exclude to hit such limit in a few days. It's true that once that limit will be hit there are official guidelines in place that say to give ICU to people with better life expectancy.

If you are interested to see how much Lombardia is hit compared to other regions, take a look here http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Not sure what point you're trying to make here?

1. As the fact-check you posted says: "Italian health care workers who are overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases could be faced with decisions about allocating limited life-saving treatment to those with the most likelihood to live longest upon survival. "

2. Age is one of the major risk-factors for death from COVID-19. [1]

3. The Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care published guidelines, which read: "Informed by the principle of maximizing benefits for the largest number..." ... "...the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care. ... It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care."

Therefore the concept that elderly people might be de-prioritised for life-saving care (such as access to ventilators) in favour of other more likely to survive and/or live longer upon survival, is valid. Whether the exact quote ('we no longer help those >60') is accurate or not (or an accurate but hyperbolic quote from the doctor in question) doesn't detract from the awful situation ongoing in Italian hospitals right now.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... [2] http://www.siaarti.it/SiteAssets/News/COVID19%20-%20document...

There is an official directive to cut off the 80+ year old and people with a certain comorbidity index if... I guess they are unofficially doing it already and the cut-off age is based on realities. There is a thing called triage, doctors and humans practice in tough times.

"The criteria for access to intensive therapy in cases of emergency must include age of less than 80 or a score on the Charlson comorbidity Index [which indicates how many other medical conditions the patient has] of less than 5." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/14/italians-80-will...

Please note that is the richest area in Italy and hospitals are top notch. Just the volume...

Yes, this reek of fake news. If Doctor really had to make the tough choice of who to keep alive, it wouldn’t be just an age cutoff (and definitely not such a young age), but a spectrum of input, including life expectancy and quality of life expectancy for the patient.

This is from 16 March. The article was published today.

True. I also googled to find corroborating reports but could not, so I remain skeptical of the characterization in the article.

Rating: "mixed", i.e. "true after a fashion", admitting that guidelines allow for that, but ignoring that the real claim is not "Italy officially abandoned the elderly", but "Italy's healthcare effectively doesn't treat them", and the latter is corroborated by at least two interviews with staff on-site that appeared on Twitter and in the news.

Doctors make calls like that all the time. It may not be worth it to expend resources on a patient with low survival likelihood. It may not even be in the patient’s best interest.

Of course! Which makes this Snopes article a piece trying to debunk proper medical practice.

This doesn’t clarify whether the article is correct or not.

Slightly unrelated... I'm not questioning validity of the claims in the above link.

Politics taints journalism far too much. I've found snopes.com to have the similar set of biases as the left-leaning media like NYT, WP and CNN. I don't think it's reasonable to accept for-profit orgs as arbiters of truth, since they don't have an inherent incentive to be truthful. To say that "you as a for-profit are going to say truth and only truth" is problematic and in itself deceitful. At least NYT and others are not claiming that.

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