It's safe to say that the US will likely look worse than Italy or South Korea since additionally the US also has:

- Inconvenient labour laws regarding sickness, people are and will be afraid to take sick leave

- A lack of public healthcare, the US system does not seem designed for a collective approach.

- A higher rate of diabetes compared to the rest of the developed world which seems to be affecting quite a lot the impact of the virus.

Also a stronger aversion to control orders. Can you even imagine telling someone they cannot buy as many X as they want? Or locking down a city?

I find it fascinating that authoritarian regimes have an advantage in that they can rapidly implement lockdown.

Freedom has a price.

I would not say that authoritarian regimes necessary have advantages, Taiwan and Japan seems to handle this crisis much better than Iran for example.

Culture does play a big role into that indeed though, if you can manage to close off events & cities and having your citizens obey all the health precautions, it has a big impact on how it spread.

My local Costco is already telling people they can only buy 2 waters, paper towels, and disinfecting wipes. No one is rioting.

It's a business, they're free to do whatever they want. I'm not sure how well people would react if the government tells them they're not allowed to leave the city anymore. In Italy, apart from riots in prisons, the population accepts that pretty well, I'm not sure it'd be the same in the US.

Maybe Costco is an authoritarian regime!

They already made you carry identity cards. "Show us your papers!"

As almost all business, it is.

* rampant thoughtless individualism has a price.

On the other hand, the US has a lower population density and less use of mass transit.

It's also not clear what advantage "public healthcare" is supposed to have in this context. The CDC has the authority to test and quarantine people. For the majority of people infected the "treatment" is to stay at home and recover. A minority of people will require hospitalization, but most of those people will have health insurance. The vast majority of those requiring hospitalization will be elderly and eligible for Medicare. The large majority of the remaining minority of a minority will have private insurance. And the remaining minority of a minority of a minority who require hospitalization, aren't eligible for Medicare and don't have private insurance will presumably still get treatment and then have a bad day when the bill comes, which is a financial problem rather than a medical one.

> still get treatment

Everyone always seems to forget about this. According to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act[0], any hospital that accepts Medicare must "provide an appropriate medical screening examination (MSE) to anyone seeking treatment for a medical condition, regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay." And if it's determined that treatment is required, or the patient's health may be in serious jeopardy, the hospital is required to treat them until they're stable.

In other words, if you show up at the ER, they're required to run tests to see if you have a life-threatening condition. If you do, they're required to treat you until you're stable.

Everyone makes it out like US hospitals will simply turn people away at the door; in fact, they can't (assuming they accept Medicare, which most do). They'll at least find out your status, and treat if necessary.

If you've ever been in an ER waiting room, you've seen this posted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

I hate to break it to you, but when society starts to unravel because there are 1,000 dying people lined up outside the hospital and no free space on the floor for them to be treated, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act won't be worth the paper it is printed on. Words and laws can't make 0 hospital beds fit 1,000 untreated patients...

Not getting treated because there are no resources available is a completely separate problem from not getting treated because you don't have insurance. At that point you're down to solutions like converting the nearest hotel into a temporary hospital.

> It's also not clear what advantage "public healthcare" is supposed to have in this context.

In place and redeployable infrastructure.

Is that a real difference or a hypothetical one? Private healthcare providers can lend each other staff and equipment if one is overwhelmed and another is idle.

What you'd want from a government is to have a surplus of portable infrastructure able to be deployed in an emergency, but that's the CDC and FEMA.

> The CDC has the authority to test and quarantine people

And what of that when the President doesn’t like the numbers he sees, stokes the many conspiracists among his supporters with distortions and outright falsehoods, and that segment of (likely well-armed) population that think the “deep state” is executing a coup, start resisting?

Actual militias living out in the woods are among the least likely to become infected (and thus quarantined). Milquetoast anti-vaxxers who live in cities and buy coffee at Starbucks are not going to try to take down the CDC in large numbers, and the four of them who do try will just get themselves arrested.

> It's also not clear what advantage "public healthcare" is supposed to have in this

More people going to a doctor because they aren't scared of the bills means more people being properly tested, properly quarantined, contact-traced, and most importantly properly reported and reflected in the statistics, leading to better countermeasures and responses.

The obvious solution to this would be to offer free testing to anybody without insurance who a doctor thinks should be tested. It's somewhat stupefying that neither the insurance companies nor the government are already doing this (assuming they're actually not).

> Inconvenient labour laws regarding sickness, people are and will be afraid to take sick leave

Are you familiar with sick leave policies in Korea?

> Higher rate of diabetes

Korea has 8% with Type-2 diabetes and 23% are pre-diabetic. The US does have a higher rate, but not by much: 10.5%

> lack of public healthcare

Just 8.5% of Americans are uninsured. So about 9 people out of 100. There may be capacity concerns, but no more than most other countries. If a surge of British citizens suddenly went to the hospital, they’d be overwhelmed as well.

I believe the concern about uninsured is not the numbers but who'd be affected. Office workers, which can quarantine rather easily, are likely to be insured. But those in contact with most people on a daily basis (e.g. fast food workers, retail employees) are more likely to be uninsured and also have a lower allowance for sick days or PTO.

My concern would therefore be that the people that cannot afford health care or quarantine are also the ones most likely to act as multiplier as they come in contact with hundreds of people a day. That's not a purely US problem, e.g. delivery drivers or Uber drivers also tend to be low wage and self employed in Europe.

But in the US the combination with the lack of health insurance could make this worse.

Kaiser Family Foundation puts the rate at over 10% of people under 65 years old. They also don't discuss underinsured folks. This is becoming a thing again now that our idiot president relaxed regulations.

https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...

https://khn.org/news/underinsured-explainer/

8% versus 10.5% of 325 million us residents is a difference of 8,125,000. The U.S. healthcare system is not equipped to treat that additional 8MM people because our citizenry is much sicker than other countries.

the greatest weaknesses in the u.s. is a sense of self-entitlement, selfishness, and an inability to stay calm in any sort of "panic" situation. the u.s. government and general public have no idea how to sanely handle emergencies on its own soil.

I assume you haven’t had that much exposure to other countries? The US is no more prone to panic than any other country I’ve lived in.

it's a wrong assumption. i've had enough exposure to know that the u.s. government is not equipped, logistically at a minimum, to deal with these things. and people are not equipped either.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar, regardless of which country it's about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

i didn't. i didn't mention a single other country. it's an historic fact that the u.s. has not dealt with the same level of disturbances other countries have dealt with. and the u.s. quite clearly struggles with these emotional issues.

any "nationalistic flamewar" is an interpretation by others.

I’d argue that the greatest weakness in the US is the lack of ability of its political/administrative system.

When either the authoritarian leader of China, or the elected government of Italy decide that the country needs to quarantine, they do it. Meanwhile nobody even believes it’s possible in the US because the system is set up not to allow any even mildly controversial law to pass without months of bickering (see Obamacare which would have been considered a relatively moderate reform in any European parliamentary system)

Last reports I saw had us 11 days behind Italy based on known cases. We are probably even closer with unknown cases. I think tomorrow is the day to ensure you have a couple weeks of food and incidental supplies in your home if you haven't done so already. I don't think there is any hope of us slowing things down as successfully as they have in South Korea with their widespread testing.

See, there's the mass panic I was talking about. We're not expecting an asteroid or a tsunami, people can still buy groceries in South Korea / Italy / Wuhan / etc...

Sure you should stock up on essential medicines that you might need if you have to stay in for awhile, but I wish people would knock off the chicken little attitudes. It doesn't help, and it makes people stop listening to reasonable precautions when the sky consistently fails to fall.

Thank you for the example; please don't go spouting this stuff to your friends and family. Just tell them to wash their hands and keep their distance from others instead of advocating full-scale panic.

Just because you can leave your home doesn't mean you should. I don't say this just for personal precaution. I saw this so people can act selflessly and self-quarantine at the first sign of problems. Most of the people reading this are probably healthy people in their 20s-50s. The virus doesn't pose too much of a threat to us. But these people can also be prime carriers of the disease and increase its spread. If you or someone in your house gets sick, you really shouldn't be going out in public to buy groceries even if it is technically still possible to do it.

And for the record here is a 12 day old article that says Italy has had 650 cases and 17 deaths[1]. The CDC website currently has us at 647 cases and 25 deaths [2] and plenty of other places are reporting higher numbers[3]. I don't think I am raising a false alarm here.

[1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/27/8099845...

[2] - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html

[3] - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/live-blog/coronav...

For reference, relatively live updates of stats worldwide https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Thanks for posting that site. I hadn't seen it before. Comparing Italy and the US we appear to be roughly 9-12 days behind Italy depending on which specific metrics you look at like total cases, total death, new cases, or new deaths.

It's 2020, you don't need to leave your house to buy groceries...

Until the VC money runs out.

Or the shoppers get better at math.

Or I have some personal pride. That one usually wins.

The point of stocking up on food is to avoid the need to go to the grocery store during the highly infectious phase of the pandemic.

The best way to minimize the chance is to not leave the house. The best way to avoid leaving the house is to have enough supplies in for a few weeks.

I'm surprised that the comment like this even had to be posted.

That's exactly why you do it

I don't think his issue is with lack of food in stores. I think his issue is that you would definitely not want to go to do your daily grocery in a city with such large outbreak as Wuhan. Better stock up and when the high infection ratio hits in your town, (if ever (?) then at least you don't have to expose yourself by going outside.

While panic buying isn't advisable, buying larger amounts certainly is. I guess most of us have gotten used to being able to go shopping every day. Reducing that to once a week can greatly help reducing the spread of the virus. If everyone starts that at once it will cause shortages for a few days but not much longer.

That's absolutely true, but the problem with this virus is not mortality but hospitalization. I read numbers yesterday that in Bergamo, up to 30% of ICU patients are under 60. Those are very likely to survive but need ICU treatment for up to 2 weeks.

Most European countries have already accepted that most will get infected at some point (see Merkel's statement yesterday). It's all about flattening the curve to make sure hospitals have capacity. If we manage that, mortality could stay at reasonable levels. But we have no idea how high mortality rates could go if people with severe symptoms would need to stay at home.

median age of hospitalization in Italy is 65

https://twitter.com/Dr_FarrisD/status/1237499092835676162

And median age of death >80. Which exactly proves the point, younger people (as in not seniors) also need hospital treatment but recover much more likely.

I wasn't arguing against your point. I think that the median is a better data point for your argument

You’re getting downvoted, but none of your facts are inaccurate.

Those in the Bay Area should already have that: it’s called earthquake preparedness.

People really need to calm down. This isn’t Ebola but people are acting like it is.

Ebola would be easier to manage. Yes it’s much more deadly if you get it but it’s also a hell of a lot harder to get.

This is truly interesting because obviously virus does not prejudice. So what is so special about Italy than other countries like Germany or France or Spain doesn't not have same size of an outbreak?

Initially I was thinking its the testing part. If you test nobody then nobody is sick. But that's not the case because with such high level of mortality, we would know that people are dying from COVID-19.

So my take is - what I read via WHO, is that this virus has two or more strains, one more deadly than another. So its quite possible that one or more passengers from China traveled to Italy with that more deadly type in them.

Of course next logical question would be - is it only in Italy or we have those in other countries and perhaps incubation period is longer? That's probably a billion dollar question...

Nothing is special about Italy; they were just unlucky enough that the spread started there earlier than elsewhere.

According to current trends, France and Spain will be where Italy is now in about week.

Exactly, joering is entirely wrong in his bizarre analysis. Outbreaks have a stochastic quality to them. If a certain individual doesn't hit a certain country first, you are likely to see false evidence that that country hit later has some sort of inborn advantage in fighting the virus. This is nonsense until proven otherwise. Italy has a huge trade with China in textiles, leathergoods, and machine tools. There is a significantly more cross-border travel between the two countries than say France. It is likely only a matter of a week or two before France and Germany and Spain and then the UK experience similar numbers as Italy. That is, unless those later developing countries prepare by implementing social distancing and robust testing early. It looks like they are, so hopefully the growth rate will be a lot slower and health care systems will not be overwhelmed. In the U.S., we are a bit behind and it may go quite badly or our isolation and lower density may provide the needed slowing to implement effective systems. We shall see.