Based on what? According to the Bloomberg article -
”As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.”
They reached maxed capacity of beds or ventilators right? We read stories of doctors having to make life & death decisions. Where are the dead 18 year olds?
Spreading info like that on a hunch, or an exaggeration, is counterproductive if not damaging.
Current situation in Geneva, Switzerland - 2 critical male patients, one 27, one 29, no prior comorbidities at all. Not sure they will make it. Wife is a doctor and just checked this in their information system.
The idea that relatively young (most of folks here) will be just fine is not true. With overwhelmed healthcare, most criticals will simply die. Once doctors will get sick (and they will), it will make everything, I mean literally any disease and injury much more dangerous. Sure, most will survive, hopefully without any permanent lungs/kidneys/testes damage (was this confirmed or just a rumor?).
Maybe as humanity we've grown weak and can't tolerate medieval mortality rates anymore, but this is who we are right now. There is no easy solution to this. There is unavoidable harsh economic impact coming. Nobody has clue which option will be at the end better than others.
Accept it, and try to find ways to help fellow human beings instead. We are in this all together, rich and poor, left and right alike.
Two examples doesn't change the stats. There were 0.8% of deaths in Italy that did not have any prior comorbidities. Picking two of those examples does not increase the 0.8%.
I don't think any one is under some kind of delusion that some young people will die. The only question is what percentage and what changing those numbers will cost. Picking specific examples of bad outcomes and pretending the risk is as high as older people isn't doing anyone any favors.
>Current situation in Geneva, Switzerland - 2 critical male patients, one 27, one 29, no prior comorbidities at all. Not sure they will make it. Wife is a doctor and just checked this in their information system.
I don't know about the law in Switzerland but unless you are lying that is something she could be fired for in many countries.
For checking overall status without going into details? All doctors within given hospital have this kind of access here. 'Many countries' sounds rather like very few for this case, aren't you thinking US specifically?
It is as tough in Sweden, doctors and nurses have of course access to patient files but every access is logged and if someone is caught accessing files about a patient they are not working with they will be reprimanded or fired.
Fair enough, I should have said, ”In some areas”. A little snippet from the CDC I have posted a bunch that I found useful -
”Pandemics begin with an investigation phase, followed by recognition, initiation, and acceleration phases. The peak of illnesses occurs at the end of the acceleration phase, which is followed by a deceleration phase, during which there is a decrease in illnesses. Different countries can be in different phases of the pandemic at any point in time and different parts of the same country can also be in different phases of a pandemic.”
So, we know not all the hospitals are experiencing the same levels at the same time. A big reason I wish we were more precisely targeting shutdowns and quarantines.
It doesn’t make sense to throw these blanket executive orders over entire states. As we can see from the slides, the economic consequence are dire. Why not target the cities entering acceleration only?
In the meantime, start building drive thru testing. Distribute thermometers. Practice social distancing & aggressive sanitation, but not destroy out national security in the process.
But this part,
”All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions”
Sure it’s early, but even in Italy, in one of the worst places in the world for the virus right now, that information should be very illuminating to us I think.
> Why not target the cities entering acceleration only?
Because the long incubation period and the lack of sufficient testing makes it impossible to know which cities are infected early on.
And, to put more bluntly, because we have two models to look at and choose from: the Chinese one, with harsh containment measures that were very effective (if you believe their numbers) and the Italian one, with moderate containment measures and a lack of sense of urgency from the populace, which resulted in a downward spiral with more deaths than China despite having only ~58% the number of cases.
> I should have said, ”In some areas”.
And no, you shouldn't have said that, you should just wait another week.
”As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.”
They reached maxed capacity of beds or ventilators right? We read stories of doctors having to make life & death decisions. Where are the dead 18 year olds?
Spreading info like that on a hunch, or an exaggeration, is counterproductive if not damaging.