Italy said isolate earlier based on their experience and the UK did not listen!
there are reasons why Italy was hit so hard and these reasons mean it makes sense to take a different approach in the UK
www.wired.com/story/why-the-coronavirus-hit-italy-so-hard/
communities.
In Italy, 23 percent of the population is over age 65, compared to the US, where that population is 16 percent. “Extended longevity has played some role in changing the population structure,” says University of Oxford demographer and epidemiologist Jennifer Beam Dowd, lead author of the new paper. “But it actually has most to do with how rapid the decline in fertility has been in a population.” That is, it’s affected more by Italians having having fewer children than it is by them living longer.
At the same time, young Italians tend to interact a lot with their elders. Dowd’s Italian coauthors note that young folks might live with their parents and grandparents in rural areas but commute to work in cities like Milan. Data on the composition of Italian households bears out this familial arrangement too.
The study’s authors argue that this frequent travel between cities and family homes may have exacerbated the “silent” spread of the novel coronavirus. Young people working and socializing in urban areas interact with large crowds, where they may pick up the disease and take it home. If they have no symptoms, they’ll have no clue that they’re infecting their elders, the most vulnerable population.
“We know now that the mortality is higher in older individuals, but what's not clear yet is why,” says Carlos Del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine at Grady Health System, who wasn't involved in this research. For example, it could be a matter of older people having weaker respiratory systems, which could also lead to a higher mortality rate among seniors for diseases like pneumonia.
Other researchers studying why children don’t seem to get that sick from Covid-19 have pointed out the corollary: Kids tend to have “pristine” lungs that have not already been damaged by a lifetime of inflammation caused by allergies, pollutants, and diseases. This might make them more resistant to attack by the new virus.
Despite a full lockdown in place in Italy since the weekend, the virus has already spread far and wide. But with this kind of demographic knowledge, public health officials can better confront the threat elsewhere, Dowd says. “One of the points that we were trying to make is that it's not necessarily just about isolating the older population—we are identifying that they're the most vulnerable—but the general social distancing that's being encouraged to flatten the curve,” says Dowd. Flattening the curve means slowing the rate of new infections, buying researchers time to develop treatments and vaccines, and giving hospitals some respite. “I think our point was that's actually more important when you have a higher fraction of your population that is vulnerable,” she says.