That's not how the math works though. Italy is reducing the number of sick people from 1000 to 100, to use your numbers. The way the virus spread those 100 will be 250 in 5 days, 500 in 10 days, and back to the original 1,000 in 15 days.

Reducing the number of infections is only half the battle. The other half is keeping transmissions contained for several months to years.

That's wishful thinking in some ways though

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...

> Sometimes the perfect measure on paper doesn't work the way people imagine

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.

It's amazing how reckless some people can be. Shut down restaurants to stop the spread of the virus, so people go to restaurants further away, to spread the virus even more. You'd think shutting everything down would be a pretty clear signal, but apparently a lot of people just don't care.

It's complacency. People think about the here and now, not what the situation will be 7 days afterwards or more, when these measures will actually have visible effects and may ultimately impact whether they catch the disease and/or can get effective treatment for it.

I think to give these people a minimum benefit of the doubt, we as a species have never before dealt with a virus that can last on surfaces for days, incubate for several weeks, and remain in lungs for over a month beyond a “recovered” patient testing negative. Not to mention the known yet nearly impossible to measure asymptomatic spread.

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.

This is why governments should admit Covid19 is a problem that requires strong coordination at EU level. Going alone, as we've done until now, is not going to work - the continent is too small and too joined-up nowadays. Von der Leyen seems to understand this better than most, certainly better than Macron and Merkel.

Darwinism....

> "Italy should have locked down hospitals first, but it's kinda impractical"

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.

Common sense is long dead in an anonymous grave.