8 ms·

One region of Italy is close to their ICU beds limit, despite a full lockdown. And they have more beds per person than the UK. Without a full lockdown, won't th

One region of Italy is close to their ICU beds limit, despite a full lockdown. And they have more beds per person than the UK. Without a full lockdown, won't they run out of beds very quickly, thus increasing the death rate a lot?

christkv 7y ago
Yes the model they operate on is around 40% of the population will get this. Even with a lower real death rate of say 1% that still leaves over 250k people dead.
mattmanser 7y ago
Italy is almost a month ahead of most of the world in infections though, their first outbreaks were weeks ago and the source for infecting most of the rest of Europe. A lot of the UK infections can be traced to Italian holidays, for example. Even if the government does plan to lock down the UK eventually, every day must cost 10s of millions, you can understand the strategy to wait longer, and even to play it down a bit.
- new2628 7y ago
  According to the growth rates along the exponential curve, it seems more like a week or two than a month.
- lultimouomo 7y ago
  The biggest EU countries are 1 to two weeks behind Italy: https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1238604695700209664 https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1238604695700209664 (mind the log scale)
  - mhandley 7y ago
    I just posted today's update: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ Denmark and Norway are less than a week behind Italy in terms of confirmed cases per million inhabitants, as is Switzerland. Spain moved closer the last two days as well.
vanniv 7y ago
The average age of a fatal case is still north on 80 years. The UK plan is effectively to get as many people as possible that are young, and thus at a super low risk of needing hospitalization to get infected, so that they can recover and then be immune, thus making it hard for the virus to sweep through again. If 30% or more of the population were immune, it would be much harder to get a new outbreak started. With a lockdown, either the lockdown suppresses spread, in which case ending the lockdown risks re-igniting the epidemic, or it doesn't, in which case it didn't help materially anyway. If the UK can get 10x or more of the cases with only the same hospitalization numbers, they'll be in better shape than everywhere else. The core question ends up being whether they're able to effectively inoculate that many young people without it spreading to just everybody. Flattening the curve preserves medical capacity somewhat, but it also prolongs the epidemic. And since the lockdowns required to do the flattening have their own cost on lives, it's unclear whether the incremental increase in the number of lives that the medical system can preserve will or will not exceed the number of other lives caught short because the disease and also the lockdowns are extended by the extra time. You might not be saving lives, just changing which people die. Or you might save some, or you might lose more. Counting in advance is... let's say nontrivial. Even counting afterward will be hard and full of wide error bars. It's relatively easy to count how many died directly from an illness, difficult to count how many will die because they delayed necessary non-emergency care for 4 months (unrelated to the virus except for the need to preserve hospital capacity or avoid infection risk) instead of 2 months because the outbreak was prolonged, and virtually impossible to count how many die from things like "I lost my job and my life savings at the same time, and I never fully recovered, and now my whole family is much poorer, which gives us higher all-cause mortality" Everybody's talking about the first group. Occasionally, I see people admit that the second might exist and be non-empty. But, I keep feeling like I'm the only person on HN (and in my regular life) reminding people that the economy actually affects real life in major ways. (I'm probably not the only one, but still...)
- greedo 7y ago
  Are we sure that you're immune once you've been infected?
  - 7y ago

christkv 7y ago

Yes the model they operate on is around 40% of the population will get this. Even with a lower real death rate of say 1% that still leaves over 250k people dead.

mattmanser 7y ago

Italy is almost a month ahead of most of the world in infections though, their first outbreaks were weeks ago and the source for infecting most of the rest of Europe. A lot of the UK infections can be traced to Italian holidays, for example. Even if the government does plan to lock down the UK eventually, every day must cost 10s of millions, you can understand the strategy to wait longer, and even to play it down a bit.

new2628 7y ago
According to the growth rates along the exponential curve, it seems more like a week or two than a month.
lultimouomo 7y ago
The biggest EU countries are 1 to two weeks behind Italy: https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1238604695700209664 https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1238604695700209664 (mind the log scale)
- mhandley 7y ago
  I just posted today's update: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ Denmark and Norway are less than a week behind Italy in terms of confirmed cases per million inhabitants, as is Switzerland. Spain moved closer the last two days as well.

vanniv 7y ago

The average age of a fatal case is still north on 80 years. The UK plan is effectively to get as many people as possible that are young, and thus at a super low risk of needing hospitalization to get infected, so that they can recover and then be immune, thus making it hard for the virus to sweep through again. If 30% or more of the population were immune, it would be much harder to get a new outbreak started. With a lockdown, either the lockdown suppresses spread, in which case ending the lockdown risks re-igniting the epidemic, or it doesn't, in which case it didn't help materially anyway. If the UK can get 10x or more of the cases with only the same hospitalization numbers, they'll be in better shape than everywhere else. The core question ends up being whether they're able to effectively inoculate that many young people without it spreading to just everybody. Flattening the curve preserves medical capacity somewhat, but it also prolongs the epidemic. And since the lockdowns required to do the flattening have their own cost on lives, it's unclear whether the incremental increase in the number of lives that the medical system can preserve will or will not exceed the number of other lives caught short because the disease and also the lockdowns are extended by the extra time. You might not be saving lives, just changing which people die. Or you might save some, or you might lose more. Counting in advance is... let's say nontrivial. Even counting afterward will be hard and full of wide error bars. It's relatively easy to count how many died directly from an illness, difficult to count how many will die because they delayed necessary non-emergency care for 4 months (unrelated to the virus except for the need to preserve hospital capacity or avoid infection risk) instead of 2 months because the outbreak was prolonged, and virtually impossible to count how many die from things like "I lost my job and my life savings at the same time, and I never fully recovered, and now my whole family is much poorer, which gives us higher all-cause mortality" Everybody's talking about the first group. Occasionally, I see people admit that the second might exist and be non-empty. But, I keep feeling like I'm the only person on HN (and in my regular life) reminding people that the economy actually affects real life in major ways. (I'm probably not the only one, but still...)

greedo 7y ago
Are we sure that you're immune once you've been infected?
- 7y ago