Italy Copies China Mass Quarantine Strategy

The Italy government has quarantined 16 million people in Northern Italy.

This will shutdown gyms, pools, museums and ski resorts. Wedding and funerals are also suspended under the mandatory quarantine.

Milan and tourist hotspot Venice are included in the shutdown which will last until 3 April.

Italy has about 6000 official cases and over 230 deaths.

93 thoughts on “Italy Copies China Mass Quarantine Strategy”

  1. untill it mutates, also quarantaine can only work with enough tests, which there are not (sorry).

  2. … “we have good news, and bad news, Your Highness… your son did NOT die of AIDS! However, his untimely demise was for want of being unable to fight off a common cold” …

    Kind of slippery semantics, if you ask me.

    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  3. It won’t and not because the White House said so. It won’t because the virus will have infect everyone it can in 3 to 4 months.

    There will be a few stragglers here and there after the 4th month but they will be few in numbers.

  4. I under the power of exponential growth. The power of the chain reaction. That’s how a atomic bomb works. In 2 to 3 months if we haven’t found something to keep people alive the death tool will be in the 100,000 range and possible much more.

  5. I don’t agree. I think the immunity system of old people is fine. I just think that the stress of the fight is sometimes too much for the cardiovascular system of old people. Old people are just more fragile.

  6. Why don’t you tell us your fantasy of how private industry would handle the corona virus. Me, I figure they would infect everyone and sell mortgages for the cure.

    The principle of capitalism is that everything you do, you do to make profit. Nothing can be done just for the good of society.

  7. To all of you socialist pigs out there. Look at the government response to this. And you want government run healthcare?

  8. No Italy isn’t copying China. Yes they a using heavy quarantine measures. They are not piling up dirt in front of apartment doors and/or welding them shut so people have only on way out. Hope there’s no fires in those buildings. Also, Italy is not dragging people kicking and screaming out of their homes because they are suspected of infection. Look at how few people in Taiwan have the virus. They’ve been open and ready for this. China hid the truth and continues to lie about the real numbers of infected and dead. China is using this moment to consolidate power to Xi and attempt to make Communism look good. It is a Kafkaesque society.

  9. Italy is 57th in hospital beds, with 4.4 per 1000 people. But the US is 80th, with 3.3. The other question is equipment.

    On the other hand, Italy is 3rd in people over 60, with 29.3%. So they likely have more bad cases. The US is 36th, with 22.8%. But it varies between states, so some states may get hit harder. If I’m not mistaken, north Italy has more older people.

    For comparison, China has only 16.9% over 60, but only 1.5/1000 doctors. They had 2.45/1000 beds, but they could add more quickly with those new hospitals they built.

    South Korea has 22.7% over 60, 1.6/1000 doctors, but 7.1/1000 beds.

    China should’ve had fewer bad cases, and SK maybe detected them earlier and maybe was better equipped. So those are important factors too.

    Re scooters etc, the plus side is less exposure to the virus.

  10. I expect there are some really amazing bargains right now for Italian travel packages!

    Unfortunately, Trump has restricted EU travel, so I can’t take advantage of them. Or at least he will, Friday. If Congress won’t. Maybe.

    Anticipated Trump tweet: “Horses running out, considering closing the barn door.”

  11. Italy has the 8th highest number of doctors per capita at 4.2 medical doctors per 1,000 people.
    The US is in 52nd at only 2.3 medical doctors per 1,000 people.
    That suggests that we can’t afford for this to get as out of hand as it is in Italy.
    https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Health/Physicians/Per-1,000-people

    It is also concerning that many of the people who normally take public transit are using bicycles, scooters, skateboards, etc. because that will increase the number of people hit by cars, so a larger trauma case load is possible.

  12. China’s active cases are dropping about 2000 per day, while Italy’s are rising 2000+ per day, so Italy’s active cases will pass China’s in a day or two.

    Even worse, their death rate is now at 6.6% and rising. It’s partly because of the older population, but also because their hospitals are overwhelmed. I’ve read today that they don’t have enough staff left open to handle other things like trauma and strokes. So likely their death rate from those things is rising too. Those are deaths that won’t be attributed to the virus, but they are caused by it indirectly.

  13. Now 16,116 active cases in China. Italy may pass them in active cases in a week. 10,590 active cases in Italy.

  14. if you think it all started with only a few cases, then i highly doubt quarantaine will help, some people will slip through unaware that they are sick. Combine it with evolutions of strains, allread China noted 2 strains. So people might get sick twice as well.
    The peek kill rate might slow down once the not so strong people are shifted out, but new strains might show to be to much, its a grim future

  15. They can try nailing them shut. But then it’ll start looking like a zombie apocalypse when people try to break through those blocked doors however they can.

  16. Looks like you’re right, but we’ll see how things go in the coming days.

    I agree re work. When I heard they still let people go to work, I was almost sure I misheard that. I expect they’ll prohibit that too, soon, especially if there’s no slow-down in new cases.

  17. No slowdown, only delays in data from some zones, in my view, letting people go to work is too Dangerous, Chinese closed everything, and they didn’t do it for pleasure.

  18. I think that they are recording them under different causes,
    real cause now is covid, real cause than was murder.

  19. Well, if you like inflicting WebEx on your competitors to slow down their productivity, this is as good as it gets…

  20. You can buy an oxygen machine on amazon if you panic early

    So we are getting two messages here.
    1.. DON’T PANIC. The worst thing in the world is panic. It’s worth while concealing the truth and downplaying the crisis even if more people end up sick, providing we stop public panic. Panic is the worst.
    2.. Panic is defined as taking any preventative steps at all and putting in any form of forward planning.

    Excuse me if I think that panic is probably a good idea at times.

  21. They did have a slow-down today, “only” 11% increase in cases, vs 20-25% every day for the past week and a half (9 days). Still early to tell if it’ll hold, but it’s an encouraging sign.

  22. Oh yeah, the Italians are going to weld people’s doors shut?

    Just looked at this containment zone for New Rochelle. The news sites are saying New Rochelle is only 25 miles north of New York City. Apparently they never heard of Google Maps. The border of New Rochelle is less than 500 meters from New York City.

    Come to that, I can see edge of the containment zone from my front porch. Doesn’t look like anyone is panicking though. At least not yet. Barber shop was sure empty tho.

  23. Yes, but you’re not taking the whole picture into account.  

    If you are NOT dead, but walking around, distributing active viruses, but your body hasn’t failed so badly as to be bedridden, you’re passing around the bug.  There is very little short-term-evolutionary-selection enhancement that gives the upper hand to the less-lethal forms.

    The truth is rather grim: what we’re really dealing with is a turtle-vs-rabbit race, on an individual-by-individual basis. You ‘catch it’, and your immune system takes awhile to recognize a foreign-to-be-fought pathogen. The older we get, the slower our immune systems react to novel pathogens. Therefore, the most elderly catch it, fail to fight it, and have high probability of dying. The young, react much faster, and personally ‘nip it in the bud’.  

    Basic epidemiology.
    Nothing complicated at all. 

    And still, not comforting.
    Because I’m old.

    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  24. Quarantine= “single out”, not playing cards in a house.
    There is a example in japan, a guarantined tourist of a cruise ship got no treatment, no medicine, no medical check. She “recovered” after two weeks luckily, and returned to HK so far so good.

  25. If we’re comparing to seasonal flu, its asymptomatic cases aren’t being caught and counted either. So I think the death rate per confirmed cases – or even per symptomatic cases, which would be higher – is more relevant.

  26. Many of the US deaths happened because it struck at a Nursing Home. The absolute worst population to have an outbreak in.

  27. 4% is probably the correct ‘deaths to reported cases’ number. But the Diamond Princess testing found about an equal number more infected cases that showed little or no symptoms. China probably doesn’t catch such cases. So I used 2% as a more conservative estimate.

  28. If we just hit the level of yearly flu cases, that’d be 16M to 65M cases, ultimately around 320K to 1.3M deaths.

    That’s assuming 2% death rate. Currently the US is at 3.4%. It’s going down, was around 4% earlier, but if the healthcare system is overwhelmed with a large number of bad cases, it can go up again. China is at 3.9%, and Italy has already hit 5%.

    (And even 2% is 20 times higher than the seasonal flu.)

  29. It MUST be a paid “holiday”, at least enough so people can afford the basic necessities – or lots of people will break the quarantine.

    Businesses won’t like paying for that so governments probably have to agree to reimburse them to some degree. That will quickly get expensive to fund.

    So instead of making it universal, do it only to cities where there have been COVID-19 cases. That’s rapidly growing toward “all of them” though, so this needs to be done soon.

    OTOH, if we can agree to do something soon – like within the next week – it might be enough to ban all public gatherings in cities with any cases, move all proven and suspected cases to individual isolation/observation, and quarantine all contacts of those proven or suspected to be infected. (The latter contacts could be released if the ‘infection suspect’ tests negative.)

    The difficulty of this “lighter” approach is verifying that people don’t break quarantine – many will try. That requires workers doing random and fairly frequent spot checks (via video conference where possible), and at some point the number of workers required will become prohibitive.

  30. Lots of conventions are (quite rightly) shutting down to avoid spreading the virus. SxSW, GDC, etc.

    I’d like to see them move on-line.

    We’ve got plenty of Web infrastructure to let them give all their talks via streaming video. It’d be accessible to far more people than a typically distant physical venue. They could drop ticket prices and see “attendance” jump dramatically.

    Or keep it “expensive and exclusive” if that’s a goal – but a better approach that gives some of the same ‘access to the speakers’ would be to record sessions, schedule them to replay at fixed times, and have the speaker jump online to answer questions at the end of each replay.

    Where “networking” is a big thing, we’ve got VR systems that can give a fairly decent approximation of face to face conversations. Their quality has come a long way. Many will let you use a PC screen, if VR headsets make you dizzy. If VR is too gimmicky for their audience, there are audio-video and text conferencing systems, such as that used for some online classes.

    This could be a key transition point, in which people recognize that they really don’t need to be physically present for a lot of things traditionally done that way, and discover functional advantages beyond less time and money spent on travel.

  31. So basically you would treat it like a bad case of the flu. If we just hit the level of yearly flu cases, that’d be 16M to 65M cases, ultimately around 320K to 1.3M deaths.

    With about 4M to 16M cases being kids, at their “mere” 0.2% mortality rate that’d be 8000-32000 dead kids.

    THAT would create a panic that shuts down the economy.

    Even imposing a 2 week “shutdown, stay at home” on every city with even one infection case would not do massive harm to the economy – and I’m sure there are less draconian approaches that would be nearly as effective.

    But what we’re doing now is NOT working. If the spread isn’t slowed, we will exceed China’s 80K cases before the end of this month!

  32. People have the capacity to assess their health, plan for the future, and act now. That isn’t an illusion.

    On the other hand, I suppose if every 80 year-old tried to buy an oxygen machine today, we’d run out. So freedom of action depends on the inaction of others, and perhaps therefore you may be right about a rather higher death rate for the populace at large.

    Of course, crashing the world economy will find a way to kill a lot of people too.

  33. I guess I’ve been thinking about it from the personal risk side. Not being infected yet (as far as I know), what matters to me is total death rate versus infection, including asymptomatic cases. I care about the asymptomatic rate, because there’s a good chance that’s where I or those I care about will be. Once you’re already showing symptoms, you start to care about a different math.

  34. Wiping out the unwanted by not having anyone die at all? That’s sneaky, nobody will ever suspect it.

  35. No, it’s just that we understand the many different factors that can underlie the number of reported cases and can do math.

    0.1 to 2 percent mortality rate – the majority being the elderly and others vulnerable to sicknesses in general – is concerning, not apocalyptic. That number will come down as treatment improves and people are more likely to self report, and in four months or so we’ll be seeing deployment of a vaccine. Bulk communicability, not lethality, is the real threat.

    So the elderly and vulnerable stay home if cases pop up in their area, everyone maintains good sanitation, activities postponed or cancelled on an as needed basis, and meanwhile life goes on.

    Or we could all panic, shut down the economy, blame Trump for the outbreak and the crash, and let the players desperately working to downselect the unacceptable interloper get away with it. Again.

    I vote no on the latter.

  36. You forget the Orange one does not consider any State he did not win as America. They are all traitors. So by his definition, there are only a few cases.
    He will probably cut off travel to those States, and prevent those States from isolating any of the counties to protect the rest of the State.
    I doubt he has ever shed a tear for anyone except himself.
    He is even doing the fake violin thing on Twitter.

  37. If you have to quarantine 16 million people then your containment efforts have already failed. You might as well let the disease run its course since it’s going to anyway.

    The disease is mostly fatal to people over 60 yrs old. It is going to hit the baby boomers pretty hard.

  38. This epidemic is going to roll on for a year or two. Attempts by the White House to play it down at the beginning of the epidemic are are going to look ridiculous in 6 month’s time. It is going to look ridiculous in a few weeks!

  39. We can divide this into two statistics: death rate vs all cases (including asymptomatic and undetected), which may indeed be as low as 1%; and death rate vs confirmed cases, which can go as high as 4%, maybe higher. Both depend on other factors as we’ve noted. Frankly, the asymptomatic cases don’t matter much, other than for spread control. 4% of confirmed cases is still high, even if there are 4 times as many asymptomatic cases.

    IMO, the travel bans should have been implemented much sooner. This virus only spread as far as it has because people kept moving around.

    If China had closed its borders as soon as they realized they had a problem, and all other countries had immediately placed all recently-entered Chinese nationals and everyone who was in contact with them under quarantine, this may have been contained mostly to China (edit: more correctly, anyone who’d been to China recently, or who was in contact with such persons). If Italy and Iran had done the same back when their exponential curve was only starting, most of the rest of the world would not be infected right now.

    At this point, the best we can hope for is to slow down the spread, to give the healthcare systems more breathing room.

  40. I’ve considered 4, but discounted it until now since they already had some recoveries. AFAIK, this virus takes longer to recover than die.

    But I just had a closer look. Their early cases are 5-6 weeks old, but their big increase in cases started less than 2 weeks ago. Up until then they’ve only had a small number of cases.

    So probably, the recoveries are from the early cases, and it’s still too early for deaths from the big cluster. But likely other factors are also contributing. Other countries with a similar case curve and fewer cases already have deaths. US and Spain, for example.

    Yesterday evening there was 1 death listed for Germany, but now it’s back to 0. It may have been just a mistake, but it’s also possible someone is suppressing death reports for Germany. At least on Wikipedia.

  41. This is a bit of an illusion. You can buy an oxygen machine on amazon if you panic early. If you wait until you need one you cannot.

  42. About half of the infected on the Diamond Princess showed no symptoms – such cases mostly won’t be caught at all ‘in the wild’.

    Also, the infected passengers would mostly have been detected early and started getting care – treating symptoms. Most “wild” cases aren’t detected until the patient is already pretty sick.

    So those two factors might explain the difference between China’s experience and the Diamond Princess.

    So the Diamond Princess passenger’s COVID-19 results are probably not representative of what we can expect for the rest of us.

  43. Quarantine, in a country famous for the locals flaunting the rules (second only to Greece perhaps?), and they think it will work?

    There apparently is some fingerpointing in Italy over a cruise ship that was isolated for a day or two, before all 6000 passengers were let off. The public assumption is some carriers got loose from there. There is also separately a bit of a racist undertone, in that a large number of fashion brands employ legal/illegal chinese workers (something like 300,000) and some people think they were carriers…

  44. Once you eliminate the great majority of cases, it becomes a lot more feasible to contain the rest using contact tracing, quarantines of those particular contacts, etc.

  45. Sure, how much time do you want? We’ve had 22 deaths – will 100 be enough? 200? 2000? The USA could hit that many deaths this month (March) if our current case growth rate continues.

    I’ve heard talk radio hosts down-playing COVID-19 because the number of cases and deaths so far is so low compared to the flu. It’s “just Democrats trying to hurt the economy to make Trump look bad. The economy is going to be fine.”

    I’m pretty sure they understand ‘the miracle of compound interest’, but seem unable to apply the same principle to a disease that’s currently ‘earning’ 25% a day! (More like 33% averaged over the past week.)

  46. German possibilities:
    1.The Germans may have better ECMO machines
    2.Everyone who had the slightest temperature showed up for testing, and they are identifying nearly everyone
    3.They have a huge number of false positives
    4.It is just early
    5.All the old people/unhealthy are being better protected
    6.They are not reporting deaths due to some legal oddity
    7.Germans are getting a lower exposure when they get it…because they are not doing the kiss greeting…?

    There are worse things than the kiss: https://nypost.com/2018/03/10/genital-grabbing-used-to-be-a-way-to-say-hello-in-australia/

  47. Indeed. Successful viruses can’t have a high fatality rate. They need their hosts to survive long enough to propagate widely.

  48. No drugs? What do you think people will be doing for 4 weeks stuck at home?

    Probably heaps of crime too now that our hated overlords have criminalized writing or reading something that is doubleplusungood. Probably have people teaching their dogs illegal tricks. etc.

  49. If you are just recently infected, and quarantined at home with an uninfected person, you might sneeze on a table two weeks from now, and the household member might catch it a week after that. They would finally emerge from the quarantine while still quite infectious. (many viruses can survive for more than a week on a surface)

    This wouldn’t happen very often, but it would happen enough.

    Then there’s all the emergencies and critical economic functions and so on that means some people would need to break quarantine for some reason or another.

    Although, if you did manage to get most of humanity to hole up for a month, you would probably significantly reduce many diseases for the next year or so. If you could introduce this as a sort of yearly traditional holiday it would be interesting.

  50. I agree that overwhelming healthcare is a risk, but we’re not going to all get it at once. And I’d like to point out that in the US the average age is 38, while the average age on the ship was 58. On the ship, literally nobody beneath the age of 70 died. In a real world scenario, not even 10% of infections will need oxygen.

    We do need to manage this, but I really can’t see us getting a higher death rate than China.

    That said though… you can buy an oxygen machine on Amazon. If you’re elderly and anticipate the hospitals being too full, it would make more sense than stocking up on toilet paper and face masks. For those who expect to be at increased risk, it’s something to think about.

  51. If the death rate from Diamond Princess was 1%, my guess is the real deathrate when everyone gets it is going to be closer to 5%. Getting to 1% is dependent on 10% of cases getting mechanical ventilation or supplemental oxygen and care for the better part of a month. When they don’t, many of them will die.

  52. I’m not convinced. South Korea is 0.7%, but China is 3.8%. The rest of the world excluding those two is 2.4%. Iran is supposedly 2.5%, but their numbers are even less reliable than China’s. Italy is almost 4% (3.96). The US is currently at 4.3%. On the other hand, France is 1.2% and Japan is 1.3%.

    The reason I brought up the ship for my stat is that they actually tested the entire population and caught all asymptomatic cases, and they have had enough time for the disease to run its course. Just about everywhere else is rationing test kits and leaving the asymptomatic uncounted, except for South Korea.

    The ship is the most accurate count. A little over 50% of the infections they found were asymptomatic. We do need to normalize for age and health status though, and yes, everyone on the ship got developed world healthcare. That won’t be true for everywhere in the world, but do you really think the virus will be held back from places that can’t manage decent healthcare anyway?

    I agree that if we get overwhelmed it will increase the death rate. So it does need to be managed and not ignored. But massive population wide quarantines will cause more harm than good. We don’t need travel bans. We don’t need to lock people in cruise ships (even though the first one was so instructive), and we don’t need to fumigate every facility that came in contact with an infected person.

  53. Agreed. This doesn’t kill us and society doesn’t break down, and we don’t go dystopia. That’s how I see this playing out.

    I see it being crappy, but I also see us really tackling the overall coronavirus family, and finding vaccines for multiple viruses. I think this is going to be great for research purposes and for new ways to handle viruses.

    COVID19 could mutate sure. But I don’t think it will mutate into anything even remotely near causing 100% mortality.

    In terms of the species, we couldn’t sustain an annual mortality rate of 250 million per year. But to think it could suddenly get that bad, or that we won’t get ahead of this thing before it gets that bad, seems like anxiety.

  54. Any bend in the exponential curve upward is a good thing. It means that this should mostly burn out in a month except for the stupid people who keep mixing in crowds.

    To be safe, people need to be careful even after numbers go to zero.

  55. 100% death rate solves the problem. People would just lock themselves in for two weeks and come out. All the already infected people would be dead. Problem solved.

  56. Might we right about Iran. As for Germany, its a bit early. Their Healthcare system is comparable to ours.

  57. Mutating to something near 100% death rate is extremely unlikely, so the species will survive.

    China’s new cases have gone down significantly, and their recoveries are at 71% and rising (at least according to their published numbers). That alone is 1.4 billion survivors, unless they get a 2nd, much worse outbreak. But they’ve demonstrated just how far they’re willing to go to stop it, so that’s not likely.

    South Korea also seems to be peaking. I think they’ll peak at around 10000 cases. With some luck, the new quarantine will help Italy stop their outbreak too. But Wuhan has a similar population size to what Italy is quarantining now, and Italy probably won’t act quite as harshly as China, so they may climb at least as high as China before they come down (80K-100K cases at peak, maybe more).

    Most of the rest of the world still has much lower case numbers. If things get worse, they’ll apply harsher means. So it may still be contained to tens of thousands of cases or less per country. Which would be up to several million in total.

    It does look alarming, but not end-of-the-world level yet. Still, each million cases is a few tens of thousand dead. Not nice.

  58. You might be tongue in cheek but it may be a good idea. Everyone, take two weeks off and stay home.

  59. hat it shows to me is a pandemic, governments dont have it under control, while its spreading like a wildfire, at this rate in about a month most of the world has been sick or died of this, it be extreme rare if you didnt catch it
    .
    I dont know if it was manmade, my fear is, might it mutate in something worse, once that happens we’re history as a species.

  60. 2 weeks would be enough, and 1 week would also statistically have a huge impact.
    Also people should be reminded about Ethics en Ethos, if your sick stay home dont go to work. Food might become problematic if no one works in that area.

  61. That would be awesome, but probably can’t be done: too many people would break the quarantine, specially in remote rural areas, or zones in conflict. Even in our cities plenty of homeless would refuse to be quarantined. Also there are a lot of essential jobplaces that won’t do the quarantine: hospitals, emergency services, maintenance, police, …

    We can also even get countries that refuse to apply the quarantine, like North Korea. And countries that won’t bother setting an effective quarantine for their inmate population, etc. …

    Damn human nature, this is why we can’t have nice things. It would be a heaven for thieves, rapists, … ….

    But even if the quarantine was perfect, the illnesses will still survive on hospitals from people already ill before the quarantine. It will be hard to prevent completely new infections, specially on those illnesses that can leave some residual virus on the healed patient, waiting to infect other people or get reactivated at any moment.

  62. Just noticed that South Korea new cases have been slowing down the past week or so (especially the last few days), but Italy still isn’t. At this rate, they should pass SK in another day or two. Maybe even today (their current data is from yesterday).

  63. It was a 1% death rate – and this in a ship population that heavily skewed towards seniors. The real world death rate will be half that or less.

    I’m not convinced. South Korea is 0.7%, but China is 3.8%. The rest of the world excluding those two is 2.4%. Iran is supposedly 2.5%, but their numbers are even less reliable than China’s. Italy is almost 4% (3.96). The US is currently at 4.3%. On the other hand, France is 1.2% and Japan is 1.3%.

    As you can see, there’s a lot of variance, so it’s difficult to say which is typical. It looks like the general trends are that more cases or worse healcare increase the death rate. If there are too many cases, even developed countries can get overwhelmed, which would lead to a higher death rate, potentially 4% or more.

  64. The real trouble is too many people getting infected at once, and overwhelming hospitals. So quarantining those with notable symptoms and so on is still a good idea. Doctors and nurses becoming infected is also a problem, because even if they get a mild case, we can’t have them infecting people in the cancer wards and so on. So we’ll be quarantining them and disrupting healthcare when their services are most needed.

    Here’s a proposal – let’s deliberately infect volunteers. Screen them first for young people with strong immune systems. Get medical personnel. Once they’ve gotten over their infection in quarantine they’ll essentially be vaccinated and be good caregivers for others who get sick.

    I’m not a doctor or nurse, but I’d volunteer, and then religiously give blood plasma to be used as a treatment for the truly needy.

  65. We’ve way crossed over into the territory of “Fear is worse than the disease”

    That Japanese cruise ship saw 700 people get infected. It’s been weeks, just about everyone from that round who will die has died already. Everyone was screened, so even the asymptomatic were caught in the stats. It was a 1% death rate – and this in a ship population that heavily skewed towards seniors. The real world death rate will be half that or less.

    I think we are just about all going to get this disease. It will kill some people. It sucks for them. It’s a bad time to be an older person with preexisting health issues, especially ones that decrease lung or immune function. But they will get it anyway, and shutting down world tourism and supply chains and crashing the oil market won’t help that, just slow it down a bit.

  66. USA # of new cases seems to be increasing around 50% per day. That’d mean around 170 new cases March 8. I hope I’m wrong, because if that rate doesn’t slow down, the total number of US cases will dwarf China’s by the end of March.

    Our “identify contacts and tell them to self-isolate and report if they get symptoms” approach isn’t working. Funny how health officials praise the effectiveness of China’s draconian handling of their problem – but seem to think that we’ll magically keep the virus under control here with just monitoring, advising and optimism.

    The CDC ceased posting the total # tested in the US back on March 2nd – my guess is that it was alarmingly and embarassingly low compared to what other, smaller nations have done.

  67. Well eradicated from humans anyway. Until the next time someone gets too amorous with a bat or chicken or something.

  68. Officially, about 55000 recovered in China, so 25000 active. But who knows how reliable their numbers are.

  69. Officially, Iran is also near 6000 cases. But they’re claiming nearly 1700 recoveries after only 2.5 weeks since their first case. There’s no way they have that many recoveries this soon.

    The obvious explanation is they’re lying. But two other options: their tests are too weak to detect low levels of the virus, and their criteria for “infected” / “sick” / “recovered” are too lax. Probably all of the above, which would suggest a much higher number of actual cases.

    Also strange: Germany: supposedly 800 cases with 0 deaths. Is their medical care that good? Seems unlikely..

  70. Italy has quarantined 10 M people.
    Have you misplaced 6 with a 0 or are you sansantionalizing numbers again?
    We don’t know what China numbers are. All indications are that they have not fallen to 100 cases a day. Someone is shouting Fake, Fake in the background when they play it to hard. There is nothing in their formula that can bring their infection rate from 3000 a day to around a 100 in three weeks while lifting their blanket quarantine.
    I am only looking at the S. Korea numbers, they are real, I am trying to figure out if they have indeed managed to keep their figure at 400 a day with massive testing and a minimal quarantine. It seems so, but it is too early to tell. They are already setting an example to the world.

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinas-coronavirus-recovery-fake-whistleblowers-191300391.html

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-korea-tests-hundreds-thousands-210000450.html

  71. Why don’t we have a would wide Home quarantine month… the whole world goes into quarantine at home for one month, then all common viruses can be eradicated… No more colds, flu, etc,,

  72. mass hysteria… if this strategy really worked there would be no such thing as a virus in humans….

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