> By John’s numbers (0.3% die and 1% of population) Italy should get a total of 1800 deaths. Yet Italy is at 6000 and rapidly rising - using real numbers his assumptions are already wrong for a first world country that is a few weeks ahead of the rest of the world.
Just highlighting this bit of the parent’s post. If you want hard evidence that COVID-19 is quantitatively and qualitatively different from other coronaviruses that, as John puts it in his article, “actually infect millions of people every year”… Italy is it.
It's also possible that Italy is vastly unlucky for some generic reason, considering most of the deaths are in a particular region of the country and among an age bracket that is less cosmopolitan and more likely to reflect limited geographic genetic dispersion.
I suppose central China, northern Italy, Iran, Spain, the rest of Italy, and soon enough France, Germany, New York City, Israel, followed by plenty of other places just happen to be vastly unlucky for “some generic reason”.
While age is probably a factor in Italy, it's less of a factor in China, Iran and Spain, which also have high death rates (though the Chinese high death rate was mostly in the early stages). What these cases have in common is a very large surge which overwhelmed local health services.
If it was entirely based on age, you'd expect higher rates of death in Japan and Germany (both very elderly populations), lower in China (less elderly population) and much lower in Iran (young population).
It typically takes 2.5–3 weeks after the start of symptoms for hospitalized patients to die. It only takes a few days to a week for a positive test result to come back.
Up until recently people hospitalized in NYC has had access to doctors and equipment, but NYC hospitals are already on the verge of being overwhelmed, and the crisis is just starting there. 2–3 weeks ago the “CFR” (i.e. deaths to date divided by known positive cases) was also very low in Lombardy.
The mass social distancing interventions they have undertaken in NYC should hopefully start kicking in, and we can all hope that the situation doesn’t get as bad as Lombardy, but in the mean time there are going to be thousands if not tens of thousands of deaths there, and it looks like doctors may soon end up facing choices about who to put on ventilators.
Italian here. The most probable cause for that is that these areas started being affected earlier, so the virus had more time to spread before the lockdown.
That doesn't affect cfr, which was higher even before the hospitals got overwhelmed. I suppose it's possible that Italian doctors are just generally bad, but I doubt that.
CFR is affected by the methodology with which you count the positive cases. Italy is badly underestimating the number of affected people (the head of the Civil Protection service says that we could have 10 times more cases than those accounted for).
I've seen the claim that northern Italy's manufacturing industry is more integrated with China, so there was more cross traffic. I don't know how true this is.
For sure it’s more integrated than southern Italy, but I don’t know and can’t speak about other EU countries. It’s entirely possible the higher traffic brought in the first asymptomatic cases earlier than in other regions.
Just highlighting this bit of the parent’s post. If you want hard evidence that COVID-19 is quantitatively and qualitatively different from other coronaviruses that, as John puts it in his article, “actually infect millions of people every year”… Italy is it.