
Coronavirus: 132 cases in Italy. Going to be third infected country in the world - fbn79
https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2020/02/22/news/coronavirus_in_italia_aggiornamento_ora_per_ora-249241616/
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pbourke
Just going to chime in with a slightly tangential issue. It's sad to see that
many threads like this are being suppressed on HN (probably just from lack of
interest). I have to use the HN search tool to find them.

From what I can tell, there are lots of smug "it's just the flu" takes
prevalent in the mainstream of HN commentary.

Sad, because I think there is lots of interesting discussion that could be
happening around various facets of this outbreak.

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pbourke
yep, downvotes as expected. God forbid we express any meta commentary about
potential blind spots/biases in this community.

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deneb84
I am wondering if all these cases emerged because of the large scale
investigation going on. Is it possible that the coronavirus is more spread
than expected, but there are more asymptomatic cases than what we think? Are
other countries doing the same? It is quite strange that everything started
all together from different part of the country and they didn't find the
patient zero.

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anonsivalley652
It's always more spread than expected because the symptoms of infected people
take time to appear and temperature screening is almost useless. An actually
effective way pandemics can be stopped for sure requires an international
effort and discipline... quarantined people must stay isolated from others and
prevented from entering any country until the maximum incubation time. It
sucks for commerce and tourism, but that's just too bad. It's a fail of
reckless, spineless officials who enable infected idiots to turn an isolated
disease into a worldwide pandemic.

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pbourke
> An actually effective way pandemics can be stopped for sure requires an
> international effort and discipline... quarantined people must stay isolated
> from others and prevented from entering any country until the maximum
> incubation time.

How would this be possible with asymptomatic and subclinical spread? With the
absence/unreliability of testing you'd damn near need to quarantine anyone
with mild cold/flu symptoms.

Even China now appears to be relaxing their quarantines because of concerns
about the economic impact.

I think we're just going to be dealing with this over the next 12-18 months,
as countries see it arrive and spread within their borders.

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HelloNurse
Many people (probably more than in other European countries) travelled to
Italy from China, and some of them arrived before the quarantine effort got
serious.

We'll see how the relative contributions of fewer sources of infection and
more haphazard detection balance out in other countries over the next few
weeks.

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koheripbal
I don't see how containment is possible without much more robust testing.

How can you contain if you aren't detecting?

