Also, take in account that the Lombardy region and the Milan area are one of the most densely populated in Europe, with a huge traffic of people for business and tourism, as well as the economic center of the country. Preventing and containing the epidemic wasn't easy at all, and the decision to quarantine it extremely difficult given its importance.
Part of the North had already been in shutdown for a week or so. Unfortunately, a plan to greatly expand the quarantined zone was leaked to the press by a shady journalist-spy-henchman. This resulted in thousands of Milanese rushing to "escape" before the plan had officially been announced. At that point, instead of going ahead with that plan, the government shut down the whole country and instructed local authorities in the South to control and monitor the stream of "escapees".
> less willing to socially isolate their elderly
I think that's a bit of a stereotype - in reality there are plenty of socially-isolated elderly in any major Italian city. It's just that the average age is so high over there, "the elderly" as a category includes __a lot__ of people, very often still working in their 60s or 70s in key roles (or nominally retired but, say, running amateur football clubs or volunteering in other third-sector activities that end up being essential to local life). Socially isolating all of them is simply unfeasible - you'd end up paralizing most regional assemblies and even the national Parliament, for example.
If it was intended to be particular to the populace it would be: "Don't be Italian" OR "Don't be like the Italians"
Say you live in a town with 100 hospital beds, it's far better for everybody if they get 100 sick people a week for 10 weeks than 1,000 sick people this week.
Reducing the number of infections is only half the battle. The other half is keeping transmissions contained for several months to years.
Virus has spread initially because it got into hospitals and family members visiting brought it around
Italy should have locked down hospitals first, but it's kinda impractical
As for the "stay home" mantra, of course it helps, but radically changing people habits make them also less predictable, so instead of people going to work, we had people who ran away from orange areas and even red, because they could, or gathering for not staying alone, spreading it even more
Sometimes the perfect measure on paper doesn't work the way people imagine
Of course if we talk about military personnel patrolling the streets that could work, but it's a little bit against what a democracy exists for...
This is true. Here in Belgium all restaurants and non-essential shops closed. The day before this took effect, restaurants were packed with people going out while they still could. The day after, people went shopping and dining en masse just over the border in France and the Netherlands, where the same measures had not been taken.
All of this is new in so many ways all at once. Frankly I think it’s so beyond our expectations of what a virus can be that many people simply don’t believe the facts.
It's kinda pointless to quarantine people and then let them have visitors. I guess it's obvious in hindsight, but it's still hard to understand how this wasn't already obvious then.
To go one step further, it's to reduce the mortality rate. Mortality when everyone has access to a respirator is one thing. Mortality when hospitals must deny care to thousands is another.
Distancing slows down the rate so we spend more time in the first scenario. (It's too late, now, to entirely avoid it.)
But lot more have been brought to hospitals for no real reason, once they were there they couldn't be sent home anymore
In fact home confinement has increased a lot once they understood not everyone was in need of medical attention
Hell, we even tested people with no symptoms at the beginning because they said they weren't feeling fine or one of their acquittance had flu in the previous week's
That of course became immediately problematic for the healthcare system
Part of the reason mortality rates are so high among the elderly, though, is the fact that they are de-prioritized in cases when there is a scarcity of beds, ventilators, or other stuff. Doctors are forced to concentrate efforts on people with better survival chances, which are typically the youngest.
> home confinement has increased a lot once they understood not everyone was in need of medical attention
This is a double-edged sword though. My father has some contacts in the health service near Bergamo (he was a nurse himself etc etc), and he was told some cases don't even make it to the hospital - they go from cough to full-on pneumonia in less than two hours, and die on the ambulance. They now refer to late afternoon as the critical shift, when the stream of intakes spikes and ensuring they are all treated becomes extremely hard. A lot of these cases might have been saved had they been monitored full-time in a hospital.
From cough to full pneumonia in few ours sounds made up
But people with severe pneumonia that die in the ambulance is not rare
Pneumonia still kills 13 thousands people every year in Italy
Pneumonia has a very high mortality rate, the average for EU is 25/100 thousands while covid-19 is at 2/100 thousands
The flu kills between 9 and 10 thousands people every year in Italy
Most die home because nobody goes to the doctor for a flu usually
If they did, even with light symptoms, we would have the same situation we are having now
In bad epidemic years it kills way more in Italy. 24k in 2017 epidemic
You are absolutely right
This is absolutely NOT TRUE
They died because prior conditions made them weaker and a pneumonia at 84 is as deadly as a bullet in the head
Nobody is left to die in Italy
My parents have worked in the healthcare for 40 years before retiring, here we try to save everybody at the best of our abilities
- Over time, we will come up with more effective treatments and perhaps a vaccine. We will likely also have more equipment like ventilators and protective gear at our disposal.
- More people will have had it and built up some level of immunity, and "herd immunity" means it will not spread as quickly.
And what does it mean to quarantine people? How are they fed? Can they go outside?
You can't get the virus walking down the street past an infected person.
sources: 1. https://seekingalpha.com/news/3551823-just-seniors-not-clear
2. [original] https://www.ad.nl/dossier-coronavirus/40-a-50-nederlandse-co...
Vulnerable or not, the rest of the nation is a transmission vector. Also, not all deaths happen among the identified vulnerable groups: "they are very very unlikely to have anything bad happen" is completely false.
Even assuming a 4% death rate (too high for the less vulnerable), that's a 96% chance of not having the worst possible consequences. So I'd say that's "very unlikely" for them.
This isn't the flu, and it's possible for even people in their teens to die (true of the flu as well), but let's not act like it's the likely outcome.
I've seen numbers in the 0.2% range for younger (< 39) age cohorts. That's twice as deadly as the flu (0.1%) but IMO not "shut society down" levels of bad for people in that age group.
There are also several new anti-viral compounds and the potential for clonal antibody treatments whos approval might get fast-tracked if they prove highly effective.
Even absent better treatment strong measures taken swiftly will do more than just delay the inevitable. But reducing our critical care saturation we'll save lives. But there is also a very realistic prospect of improved meaningfully treatment in the coming weeks/months.
Meaning antivirals that won’t require millions of people being placed in ICUs which the healthcare system currently cannot support neither in infrastructure nor manpower.
Not everybody here is behaving like a moron, luckily.