- Joined
- Jan 26, 2019
So here's my take on what's been happening with Italy, and it's caused me to reassess how impactful I believe coronavirus is going to be. Their death rate has been way out of whack with everywhere else, sitting at 5% of all cases even as day after day the totals grew exponentially. Everywhere else was much lower, so either there's some super deadly strain in Italy (unlikely, they'd pick that up real quick by sequencing it) something really wrong with the health care system that isn't able to treat complications (also unlikely, italy has developed health infrastucture that is right at its limits now but still isn't letting people choke to death in a car park. so the only thing that makes sense to explain a 5% death rate is there must be *LOADS* more people infected that they don't know about. Like a seriously big pool of asymptomatic or borderline showing it, and it must be almost the same number again, to get the figures down to 2.5% everywhere else is seeing. I think this thing in is loads more people that don't know it themselves and if countries don't get a handle on testing and encouraging isolation (it's worked REALLY WELL in china.. ok it's authoritarian as fuck but zonal isolation and travel bans stop it in its tracks) they will be overwhelmed like Italy. They're in full lock down now.
It was established a while ago that Italy is doing so poorly because they have some of the oldest people. Something like 60% of it's population are over age 40. Couple it with a heavy smoking culture, Italy has a population of 60 Million or so. In 2018, there were 11.6 million cigarette smokers in Italy. Smoking was more common among males than among females and it was particularly habitual for men aged 25 to 44 years old, and their habit of fairly frequent interpersonal contact and you literally have a perfect storm for mass death.
28 medewerkers ziekenhuis Tilburg besmet met coronavirus
Uit een steekproef onder medewerkers van het Elisabeth-TweeSteden Ziekenhuis (ETZ) in Tilburg blijkt dat 28 van hen het coronavirus hebben opgelopen. Dat heeft het ziekenhuis zelf bekendgemaakt.www.telegraaf.nl
Dutch town randomly tests 300 medical workers who didn't travel and weren't exposed to Corona patients. 10% test positive.
IMO. Judging by this article it is already way more widespread than we know. 30 Tested positive but how many other had it and it's now cleared up? or never showed symptoms?
The problem is the people who are getting sick don't know they have Corona so they're just back to their usual business once they've cleared up enough, or never even got sick, and thus infect others because they're getting it very mildly.
I said it earlier but really, sure people can panic and pull their money but it's not like you can do anything with it. This isn't a war where you can move your money to a different market and carry on with your day. Disease can hit you if you have one dollar or one million and while having more money might make your treatment better at the end of the day you're still sick as well. Tanking the economy because they're worried because of a disease doesn't benefit anyone and arguably only makes the situation worse. Eventually this will end and things will slowly go back to business as usual, although hopefully with the caveat of getting some manufacturing back in various countries instead of relying to heavily on China.
