Italy: how did it spread?

[Miljea]

I've read a few conflicting accounts about how CV gripped all of Italy so badly, but what is the truth?

People fleeing from virus hit towns and cities just before the lock down? Thus spreading CV far and wide?

Refusals to self-isolate or inability to do so?

What do you think?

I think the figures are unreliable because everyone is documenting differently under varying criteria.

DH travels to India regularly the numbers that are being published are not accurate.

The heat will not kill it based on India alone they struggle with many viral illnesses and for much of the year it is above 25 degrees. Currently over 30 degrees and will be until Monsoon.

We can only analyse this properly with the benefit of hindsight until then

Limit contact
Wash your hands
Pray to your god
🤷‍♀️

PeterWeg where is that information from?
Please provide a source for that, otherwise you are scaremongering.

We have all been given lists from the govt saying on certain surfaces like cardboard it can survive for 9 days.

I think (but correct me if I'm wrong) that in Germany there are likely to have been more deaths to Covid than recorded as such because of the way deaths are recorded? I saw something on another thread- so it would say sepsis or pneumonia rather than sepsis as a complication of Covid for example.

That's a great point chick -- testing rates vary, reporting varies, we will only really know a lot of things when this is all over.

People are now going back and looking at hospital admissions for flu and respiratory disease since December, it's possible the virus has been circulating longer than we think as well. It's possible that many of us have contracted it without knowing.

Until they have the test that can tell if you've ever had it (which they should soon), we will probably never know the true number of total cases (which means also not knowing the true mortality rate). So I would think the most important stats right now are the numbers of people hospitalised or dying.

I haven't heard that about Germany Canterbury. At least in the media, they are being quite open about all the stats.

This was in the Independent today:

As of of Friday morning, according to the Robert Koch Institute, the country had 13,957 confirmed cases, 2,958 more than the day previously, but only 31 deaths in total. This gives the country a fatality rate of 0.22 per cent, which is markedly lower than Italy's - where fatalities have been some of the highest - at 8.3 per cent, and the UK's 2.2 per cent. This is despite the fact Germany has 10,688 more cases than the UK.

(RKI is the main government scientific institute, so these are official stats.)

If they thought the true number was higher, I do believe they would say so -- they are desperately trying to get people to take lockdown more seriously.

You can fixate on the minor cultural differences if you like but the truth is that people in Italy live much like people in the rest of Western Europe, including the UK. If you’re looking for a reason to believe it won’t happen in the UK, you won’t find one. It will happen, and because everyone is still out and about and because the NHS has even fewer ICU beds than Italy it may happen worse. You are still at the beginning.

Thanks dreaming- that's interesting even more so then, as it seems Germany has been much more successful at limiting spread.

As well as treatment obvs.

This it what pisses me off though. We know what's coming in a matter of weeks. If they had put the country on lockdown already a lot of it would've been prevented.

They cant only lockdown London. It would be pointless.

I just went to my bank as had to pay money in for bills. Shops were rammed, maccies had a queue out the door, secondary school kids let out early in big groups and a woman sat on a bench coughing her guts up. No one social distancing at all.

We are fucked.

I think it's too soon to compare as it hasn't really taken hold on the rest of Europe. Spain is rapidly catching up as is Germany, look at the figures today.. The UK will not be that far behind whe. You think plenty of people are still in bars, clubs, restaurants, gyms and we don't even know how many people are sick exactly.

Germany has 17,372 cases so hardly contained... There is also a question mark in the death count as apparently any comorbidity was counted instead of coronavirus

Ps I am Italian ans the cultural stereotypes on this thread make me jolt. Italians loving to party, kissing and living all together.. Have you ever even been to Milan? It does not resemble this description in the slightest. Lombardy is very much a northern European city, people work very long hours, are not particularly tactile and generally known to be very reserved.

Northern Italy is industrial and people live in small apartments.

Many, like London here, commute in from all over Italy and it is rare for families to live together in big groups due to cost of housing. A 2 bed flat in the centre of Milan costs similar to the same in London. Not much room for extended families.

@NoMorePoliticsPlease Yesterday someone lost their power (utilities) due to being unable to top up their meter due to self isolating and not being paid (Universal Credit) It absolutely IS political

Why is it okay to have a go at people who cant self isolate due to the way Governments have structured this country but not okay to criticize the Government. I have a thread on here about key meters and the fact that the utility companies wont step up to make self isolation and possible lockdown easier and less stressful and this thread struggled to get to page 2.

Yet threads criticising people for having problems with the logistics of self isolation/social distancing stretch to the moon and back.

A similar thing happened with Grenfell. Reams of people saying we shouldnt politicize it while the Grenfell residents themselves said that it absolutely IS political. And comes back to the way social housing tenants are viewed. Doing a search i found a correlation between people saying we shouldnt politisize and those who voted a certain way re, Grenfell.

Not accusing you of anything but i do see a pattern in what is happening in these threads

People very keen to blame the public particularly poorer people without looking at the logistics of the problem.

Same with the over 70s thread and the vitriol towards pensioners on there. 23% of them live in social housing and a good proportion of them on key meters.

Incidentally my mum comes from Naples. And only goes out shopping or to the bank. She had to be persuaded to go out for a meal for my parents Ruby wedding back in 2005.

Some nice pieces of racist shit in this thread. Any excuse for a party indeed. I am reporting posts.

Travel- I'm in Puglia and we don't really run round kissing everyone here either

Helena- the way the elderly are spoken about on MN repulses me.

The Germans may well test more then we do and therefore death rates could be much lower because of this. More cases known about and the percentage of deaths will be lower. We know we are not testing enough. So our percentage of deaths appears high but in fact could be low. Just a thought.

I have heard that if there are underlying conditions then the virus may not be listed as cause of death in Germany which would push the death rate down

That’s correct. Italy also has an aging population and possibly didn’t take this as seriously as they should. However I’m sure Italy will be informing how others self isolate etc.

As I posted on another thread, I've been tracking numbers for a while and noticed a couple of days ago that whilst figures for UK, Spain, France and Italy remained unchanged (save for the daily increase), several days-worth of German statistics recording positive cases had been altered - all of them significantly downwards. Thousands of positives wiped off their Wiki figures.

They're definitely bucking the trend.

There was an article in the FT about this today. Main points were that Germany is at a different stage in the epidemic. Still very early. They are testing more extensively than other countries so their total identified number of cases is greater than eg UK. This means that the death rate is lower. Also most of the cases in Germany are in younger, fitter people: business travellers to the far East, those who went skiing in Italy and Austria this year or those attending carnival celebrations near Aachen.

I have also read that cause of death recording is different here. So an individual with a major heart problem who dies in hospital with covid 19 will not be recorded as a covid 19 death but a coronary death. Not sure what the source for this is though.

www.ft.com/content/c0755b30-69bb-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3

I completely agree Helena

I'm also taken aback at the aggressive tone of so many posts on MN when it comes to people going out, and the way people seem to assume that everyone can just stay home and be fine.

There are threads on here about people not being able to find food, they are having to drive all over the place and go to multiple shops. That's obviously not ideal for containment. The government and the supermarkets could address this by rationing things more but it's not happening. What do you want people to do?

I don't think Germany is in an early phase -- our first cases occurred around the same time as France and Spain.

It's true that more testing would lower the mortality rate, but it's still quite striking that in Berlin, a city of 3.5 million people, only one person has died.

I dug around on the RKI site to see how they record their figures. They do include people with other conditions:

The reporting data also includes all deaths that are associated with COVID-19 disease: both people who died directly from the disease (“died from”) and patients with underlying diseases who were infected with COVID-19 were and for whom it cannot be clearly demonstrated what ultimately caused the death ("died with"). Deceased persons who had not been tested for COVID-19 during their lifetime but who are suspected of having died of COVID-19 can be examined for the virus post mortem.

There's also a very detailed stats map of Germany and some other European countries updated every day, although I don't see the UK yet:
npgeo-corona-npgeo-de.hub.arcgis.com/