Business Insider reports Photos show what Italy is like under lockdown as the country becomes Europe’s epicenter of the coronavirus.
The lead image is from that article.
Venice is “taking precautionary measures — this is not a pandemic. We decided to ban all events for a week especially to protect older citizens, but businesses are working as usual,” said regional Governor Luca Zaia in an interview.
Meanwhile, in Milan, all work activity has come to a halt with blockades preventing travel in and out of the area.
The above details are from the Bloomberg article Italy Struggles to Contain Virus With Rich North in Lockdown.
Italy’s economic engine ground nearly to a halt on Monday amid Europe’s largest coronavirus outbreak.
The hit to the economy from limiting movement and activity in the prosperous area from Venice to Milan, home to some 15 million people and responsible for almost a third of Italy’s gross domestic product, is likely to be severe.
Adding to the concern: contagion seems to be spreading mostly through hospitals and it remains unclear exactly how the illness arrived in the country.
There were already signs of panic taking hold. Shoppers stormed supermarkets in Milan over the weekend as citizens worried that food stocks would run out. Staples like meat, bread and pasta were in short supply in some stores as consumers, many wearing surgical masks, waited in long lines to stock up.
Matteo Salvini, leader of the opposition League party, used the outbreak to attack Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. Italy needs “to make our borders armor-plated,” he said, calling on Conte to resign “if he isn’t able to defend Italy and Italians.”
One of These Doesn’t Fit
- 11 Cities in Italy are in lockdown
- Half of China has travel restrictions with 60 million in full lockdown.
- Coronavirus cases are growing exponentially in Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Iran.
- This is not a pandemic.
Lies Don’t Prevent Panic
Except when it comes to finances about “free stuff” (education, health care, etc.) people generally recognize when they are being lied to.
And in this case there are travel restriction in 11 cities in Northern Italy with 3 month jail terms for people venturing outside roadblocks.
When you tell huge lies like this, people know it and that’s what feeds the fear: What else are they not telling us.
Coronavirus Podcast
This morning I was a podcast participant with Jim Bianco, Dr. Ben Hunt, Dr. Chris Martenson, and Erik Townsend.
The podcast is on the long side and most of my readers are familiar with the material.
But it was a pleasure to be with a group of bright people who had this pegged correctly from the beginning.
All of us wish we were wrong.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Wow! After a few days drinking from the web fire hose, I know a lot more about viruses than I ever wanted to. It’s not good. If they were 20 feet tall, weighing 30,000 pounds, we’d long-since have named them something like T-Rex and built stockades around them…or ourselves, but they’re only 80 billionths of an inch tall, and we still have laughably inadequate detection and early warning tools to protect ourselves from them.
We have massive data files files on them, but they mostly seem like SEM photos of a train wreck, not going to help if, say, a virion is sneaking on board and tying the throttle open when the train slows at the top of the immune pass.
Plus, viruses, as the pirates of cell life, have no DNA, just RNA, so they have to board another cell and hijack it’s contents to survive. Don’t laugh, the strategy has been working for them for over 60 million years. Recently, humans have made it a lot easier for them by crowding into huge population centers and transporting ourselves between those centers at 540 mph in aluminum tubes.
We need a new plan, Stan.
Sounds like at long last, we (the USA) have a new, legitimate enemy to fight!
What a fuss ! Let s hope we re ALL sick soon, for then nobody would be sick, business as usual, in fact we re ALL insane, and that s a normal too…. Excuse me for being in a philosophical mood …
Here is a ‘best case’ scenario where Covid-19 becomes “just another flu virus”. Let’s hope so. https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-coronavirus-isnt-contained/
If this Covid-19 scare turns into a real pandemic, then every manufacturer in the US (and elsewhere) will soon learn what supply-chain exposures they have viz. China and elsewhere. Already started in some places.
“In 2017, the number of people without health insurance increased to 28.0 million”
“Department of Homeland Security, which claims 11.1 million illegal aliens live in America.”
Yes there is overlap on those numbers, however, these are people that will not seek medical care (cost and fear). The spread of the virus, in my opinion, will be magnified in the US. CDC numbers come from people who seek medical care. IMO there is a “silent” number not accounted for. See, this is hen not having universal care will come and bite you in the proverbial ass.
The other shoe just dropped. Japan has switched from containment to mitigation, acknowledging that spread of COVID-19 cannot be completely stopped. Either the US will have to restrict flights from Japan as of right now, or the US will also be switching to mitigation very soon.
My son lives in Japan and he keeps me abreast on the how people there are reacting. He says that right now everyone is trying to keep a stiff upper lip and carry on, but there is a lot of fear. Also, people are very worried that the Olympic Games might be threatened.
The new normal–the world will need to get used to a period of ‘social distancing’ and bits and pieces of the world economy blinking from on-line to off-line and back again.
Who is prepared for that?
Does anyone have first hand knowledge of what our front line health care workers are instructed to do as far as testing for the Coronavirus?
I heard that Mass General is only ordering Coronavirus testing if the patient meets two criteria: 1) they have symptoms And 2) they have had contact with a confirmed case and/or been to China recently.
Seems a little suspect that they are not taking a more proactive stance.
I am wondering if other hospitals are instructed to do the same?
Not only do they seem ill prepared (and they probably are as that would require too much $ that would have to come from other areas such as building bombs) they also seem totally clueless. Like they have no idea what they’re dealing with.
One need look no further than the official CDC website to determine that little screening is being done within the US. Total SARS-CoV-2 tests that have been run as of yesterday afternoon is 426:
That is the current standard practice. In five cities they are doing more extensive testing. It’s not practical to test everyone, everywhere, who has flu symptoms at this point. Hopefully, however, they are making preparations to increase their capacity to where they can do that because the need for vastly more tests will arrive soon.
“In five cities they are doing more extensive testing.”
If that is true, then why is it not showing up in the numbers of total tested? Out of 426 tested, almost all of those must be related to repatriation flights. At best, the CDC is intending to do more extensive testing in five cities in the near future. They must not have started yet.
I would agree with that. 426 is very low. They definitely need to ramp up their testing capacity. The good thing is that the US was “mean” and banned travel to China early, but now what about travel to S. Korea, Japan, and Italy? It will arrive, sooner or later. The early ban of travel to China definitely bought us a few weeks, but not more than that.
PCR test kits are available as emergency or research use only. These are the CDC suppliers
There are others, basic unit cost per test is around 5 dollars. They had trouble with a reagent at one point, and I also think these tests are not always accurate. They are developing serology tests that are more accurate, also in China I think
So maybe they are holding back so as not to give false readings ? Maybe they use other slower more expensive tests in the meantime for cases that meet criteria ?
?
If large numbers of inexpensive antibody test kits can be deployed, then during a large outbreak that might make containment practical within some venues such as hospitals. It’s a race…
In general, any meaningfully large health care institution in the United States is following CDC guidelines, not more, not less. I am speaking from personal observation as a physician with relationships to several such systems.
Whether this is adequate is left as an exercise for the reader.
Great strategy: Tell everyone there’s not when there is in order to prevent panic and keep things running which means constant person to person contact which, ironically, spreads the disease. Then weeks later “Oh well gee, this is worse than we thought now we really do have a problem”. Politicians/bureaucrats will lie to you all the way to your grave and then want a check for your burial before your thrown in the hole.
We can argue about the meaning of the word, “pandemic,” and who we think is overstating how bad this is, and who we think is understating it. I think, though, while we should certainly evaluate world leaders, to overly focus on doing so can become a distraction. Let’s just talk about what is likely to happen in reality.
Look at what is going on in South Korea, Japan, and Italy. This represents a well-reported subset of the current global impact, and these are all developed nations. Based on their experience, any rational observer has to rate the odds of coronavirus eventually having a real outbreak in their own country, as, “meaningfully high.”
Are we going to travel ban these three countries too? What about Iran? If we did, would it even matter? By the time we all know it’s bad in one country, somebody may (will?) have brought it to another.
Coronavirus is likely going to keep springing up in new places. In each place it might kill, say, 0.5-2% of confirmed cases, depending on local factors.
What will really cause pain is much more than those deaths. Every country that gets it is going to flip out and shut businesses. People are going to stop traveling to and from these places. People in, or near, any active area, will run on the retail outlets and hoard, just like they do before hurricanes.
Some of this reaction will seem irrational, but who can blame them?
It will be humans following their nature. People will complain that the “overreaction” hurts more than the virus, but what country is going to contemplate suffering even 1/200 to die? Even 1/1000? In the USA that would be hundreds of thousands of people, an order of magnitude worse than flu.
Hundreds of thousands are not actually going to die of coronavirus in the USA (or your developed nation, dear reader). But if coronavirus gets out of control in, say, a US city, large parts of the country will lock down. Hard. The flavor will be different than authoritarian China, but in the abstract, there will be a lot of similarities. And that will hurt. A lot.
Well stated.
Major sporting events will be hit hard.
MLB, NBA, NASCAR, NHL, will all see a revenue hit as fewer fans risk gathering in crowds, and there could be asterisks for the 2020 season.
Will the summer Olympics take place? Will the Tour De France?
The reactions of the governments when it hits is the key. Don’t listen to what they say, look at what they do.
When it’s not serious you have to lie. We 50k deaths for the 2017-18 flu year in The US. We are making a big deal over nothing.
I think that the comparison of the Covid-19 to the influenza virus is an apples-to-oranges comparison. It sounds logical at a superficial level, but I don’t see any countries quarantining the US because of the common flu.
if it’s no big deal, why are those who are dealing with known infected in full hazmat gear?
The reason health workers are in hazmat gear is because nobody has immunity to COVID-19 and anyone who is exposed has a high risk of becoming at least a carrier and spreading it to the most vulnerable who are receiving medical care for other reasons, and those others may become seriously ill or die. In the case of flu, health workers have been immunized with a vaccine and there is a low risk they will become infected and spread it to others.
each year’s flu vaccine is a “best guess” of the upcoming season’s prevalent strain with each vaccine having a limited effectiveness against the particular strain it was designed to combat. furthermore, viruses tend to mutate lessening a vaccine’s effectiveness. in some seasons there is more than one prevalent strain. therefore, the flu alone is a big deal yet, no-one has any immunity to this new, highly contagious, airborne virus which is not a big deal.
If you do get infected, there is about an 80% chance that your illness will be mild. (But you will be infectious for at least a week prior to being symptomatic and another week after.)
Will you self-isolate yourself from old folks for a two month period, or are you OK with your mom spending three weeks in intensive care should she live?
With the flu you have a known commodity. Many people are vaccinated against it, and the death rate is low, under .1% most years. On average about 20,000 people die from it a year, and in bad years, perhaps 50,000. It has a finite, knowable effect on the economy.
By contrast, with SARS-COV2, no one has any immunity, so it can spread much faster. Also, it has a death rate, if you do get it, between 10x to 50x higher. We have seen multiple examples of how fast it can spread. In the absence of successful quarantines, it can grow 50-100% a day. At that rate, by the end of the year it could infect every person on the globe. If the death rate turns out to 2%, imagine 7 million dead in the US alone.
This is not the flu, and if we treat it like the flu, the consequences would be beyond horrific. Thankfully the CDC is taking this far more seriously, and they are actively seeking to contain it, and quarantine all persons who have potential contact. Hopefully it will never escape into the wild in the US, and then the naysayers can say “oh, see, it never was a big deal”, but even then they would be wrong. The need to control it early and aggressively IS a very big deal.
In short, if you are lucky enough to never get it, and never have it hit your community, it will only be because people in charge did not treat it like the flu.
In Cataluña you have regional officials saying ” Flu is much more serious” then giving figures for flu fatalities, saying for nCoV ” only 2% end up critical”, saying ” so far all cases are imported, no transmission in Spain” etc….. in Codogno you have a Spanish lady trapped there, saying no masks available, no test kits for those with symptoms, not possible to contact local authorities, not possible to contact own consulate..even David Abel from the cruiseship, saying he feels imprisoned in hospital there, then nothing from him for days…
This is reality, chaotic, and under pressure the same might apply anywhere. What you see on news is high visibility prepared response to certain circumstance, like in Canary islands, but in the real world for most people, and as far as wider management of epidemic is concerned, well people really have to assume they are on their own.
Personally, I don’t think that this pandemic will spread much further, although I have no basis for this opinion except speculation. I don’t think that this disease will cause widespread death such as we’ve seen in Hubei, but it might be problematic for those who are otherwise health-compromised. I’m surprised by how many deaths that it has not caused (outside Hubei). Nonetheless, I’m preparing. I will have two months worth of food stocked away, meds stocked up, dog food stocked up, etc. Just in case I’m wrong! Because I’ve been wrong before.
In short, “si vis pacem, para bellum”. You are doing the right thing.
yes, and lets hope the ALEA is not IACTA yet….
Hubei is it’s own world wrt this. It’s an outlier in every way. Both good and bad: It contains a/the initial outbreak site(s) (and may still host new ones. Immediate effect wild animal trade bans across China and all….).
But the sort of response initiated, is also beyond that which pretty much any other country is in a position to put together:
First quarantines of millions upon millions. Then disinfection of public spaces. Not sure what was sprayed during the massive fumigation of ever nook and cranny (pretty sure it wasn’t certified organic and fair trade….), but the onset of systematic, large scale disinfection of everywhere, at least seem to have coincided with a slowdown of newly reported cases. Now try doing that in “I’m afraid of vaccines, Nutrasweet and Monsanto’s Roundup” San Francicso…
The outbreaks in Italy, South Korea ad Iran is likely to shed more light on how this will unfold across the rest of the (at least somewhat developed and populated) world.
Speaking of Wuhan, I found this article in the Atlantic Monthly that does mention the massive buffet.
“Things went on in this suspended state for another 10 days, while the virus kept spreading. Incredibly, on January 19, just one day after the death of yet another doctor who had become infected, officials from across the populous Hubei province held a 40,000-family outdoor banquet in Wuhan, its capital, as part of the official celebrations for China’s Lunar New Year.”
Looking at the critical cases and death rates in Italy and Iran, it seems possible that the virus has already mutated into a deadlier variant that is just as dangerous to non-Asians as the original is to Asians. As to the likelihood of a burgeoning pandemic: one hopes it won’t happen, but given what is known so far (incubation period of up to 27 days, combined with the ability of asymptomatic patients to spread the infection) there has never been a comparable outbreak that has been more likely to result in a global pandemic.
“it remains unclear exactly how the illness arrived in the country.”
The world outside asia are still in denial stage – most experts now agree it probably started spreading people to people (latest) by around early december last year, yet people in planes, ships, trucks, trains continued traveling around the world for 2 more months before the first lockdown. And then they look around and ask “how cud it be? impossible!”
oh but, the european coordinator for this shit( a belgian btw) says there s no reason to be scared at all, the possibility to catch this shit is ‘infinitely small’, he says… and we should go and visit Italy with no worries AT ALL, he says ….Maybe he would say so, wouldn t he ? Because he was told to, probably….
On the latest Keiser Report, Stacy brought up a good point about how long the hospital stays are for patients with this virus. Can you imagine how expensive about three weeks would be in a US hospital? The bill could top half a million per person and insurance companies won’t allow themselves to be on the hook for it. Many of the infected would either forego treatment or get turned away due to overwhelmed doctors and hospitals. People would stop going to work, commerce would cease and the economy would truly grind to a halt.
Saw that an official from the “Ministry of Justice’s Emergency Safety Planning Office” in South Korea committed suicide this morning. Must be strange to live in a country where people feel a sense of responsibility and accountability, difficult to imagine anything other than failing upward here in the US. Heck of a job, Brownie!
China made a mess of trying to accurately gauge the virus but there seems to be no effective way to stop the spread. The virus is too easily transmitted so it will eventually be everywhere. The epidemiologists suggest something like 60% of the population becoming infected. It is the CFR that is the big question. If its much above 1% then normal economic activity will grind to a halt. Worse, without effective treatments healthcare systems could collapse. Too many doctors and nurses will get pneumonia. I learned yesterday that one of the major providers of dialysis treatment in the US will put its patient care providers in quarantine if they go on a cruise or travel abroad. Finding healthcare workers is going to be a problem as the disease expands.
We survived previous corinaviruses in Sars and Mers. It appears an effective treatment for the worst cases of covid 2019 is the same as it was for those viruses. Dont panic yet.
Do we even have human to human spread of MERS?
SARS was not infectious prior to the presentation of symptoms, so a comparison to Covid 19 is foolish.
Serious and Critical cases dropped by over 2000 in China today, so we should see deaths dropping in China in the days ahead, as expected. How much progress did China make on re-opening production today?
People with doomer bias will say that these numbers are fake and that we are facing a Spanish flu like epidemic. Never mind that their projections and analysis are based on the same “fake” numbers.
It doesn’t seem as bad as the Spanish Flu, but I do think that this could be the needle that pops this economic bubble. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to have some extra provisions set aside in case you wind up in an outbreak area.
I think people will trust the numbers coming out of places like Italy and South Korea more than China – a country that makes people disappear for thought crimes.
The effect of the virus is real though.
If exaggerated in severity you still have 35% drop in tourism to France, you still have a thousand people locked into their complex unexpectedly in Spain, border closures and so on. I don’t doubt that it will be pandemic and if this is the reaction people should prepare.
If not exaggerated then they should be even more prepared.
I don’t doubt the secondary effects are going to be big, potentially huge (maybe bigger than 2008), no matter how bad or relatively harmless the actual virus is. Panic is all that matters right now.
in all seriousness, why do you believe numbers/information coming out of china???
Why do I believe the numbers coming out of China? First, I don’t entirely believe them. Like everywhere, even if they wanted to be accurate, they couldn’t possibly conduct all the tests that were needed, nor find all the people that were infected. Once we get by that, though, they have no particular reason to lie about this. If they want their own people to not get infected and die, and their want their own people to abide by the quarantine, they need to give them some sort of semblance of accuracy. If they say “oh, no one is infected, but we need to lock you in your home anyway”, that is going to lead to revolution. Beyond that, though, their behavior matches the numbers, more or less, and actions speak louder than words.
Now, I will grant one thing. If it weren’t for the fact that we are seeing infections elsewhere, it would be plausible that there were never any infections at all in China, and that this was just an excuse for the government to make people disappear. Thus, it is plausible that China might overstate the crisis, but I see nothing to be gained for them to understate it. Overstating it permits government to intervene in people’s lives and take more control. Understating it makes any government action seem excessive.
Does the urgent need for far, far more beds match up with the data from Wuhan? For sure. How about the much higher reported death rate from Wuhan compared to the rest of China? Absolutely. How about rising deaths as cases fall? Again, that is absolutely what you’d expect, since deaths are based on cases weeks earlier. In fact, I projected that we would see that weeks ago when people were talking about how the death/cases ration was a constant at 2.1%. Do the draconian quarantine restrictions match up with with a severe crisis? For sure. Do the draconian quarantine restrictions match up with a decline in R0 to below 1 such that the infections are falling? We can only hope that this is true because it is the only hope at the moment for controlling this.
Going back to my point that actions speak louder than words, I ask again, did China attempt to re-open production this week? As an example, if their data is accurate, Jiangsu, which is one of the locked down provinces, hasn’t had a new case reported in days, and is sitting at 631. If they don’t attempt to re-start production, their actions tell you to be suspicious of the data. If they do re-start production, then that tells you they believe their own data.
i expect china is in a catch-22 with regards to restarting production. if so, restarting production means nothing.
But the lack of restarting would mean a great deal.
What else is he supposed to do? Tell everyone to kiss their ass goodbye because they are about to get infected?
I have learned quite a bit about human nature over the last couple of months. People that I care about and have been friends with for years won’t listen to what I am saying about the virus. It’s not that they don’t think I am right, it’s just they can’t except the reality I am throwing at them.
No one remembers the start. They remember the finish.
“ What else is he supposed to do?”
Tell the truth. The notion that politicians have to lie to the ‘common man’ is one of the reasons why people hate politicians so much.
Just think about it, LYING is the only option under the circumstances, innit ? Mass hysteria won t solve anything at all, we are too many and live too concentrated….For once they should lie, yet forbidding cross border travelling would ve been a good, justified, acceptable not too conspicuous measure….But it is always about the economy, innit, stupid ?
would it be in poor taste to tell the liars the pitchforks are not meant for them?
The problem is that mass hysteria is created BY lying. If you tell people the truth, people can have a rational reaction. If you lie, they know it, and figure the truth must be even worse, and then they panic from not knowing. The other problem is that lying is second nature to all politicians. It’s a core job skill, and what they do for a living.
So politicians are there to manipulate the population to do what they think is best (because people are too stupid to deal with the truth)? I’m sure Stalin and Mao would agree completely.
Tedros should be strung up. What he’s spouting is not just inaccurate it is positively evil. Doing the diametric opposite of what he should.
When it’s serious, you have to lie.
ECB will act if it hasn’t already. Germany already slow due to weak Chinese demand. No way to isolate Italy as demand drops and their supply of goods and services to the rest of the EU is also disrupted.
Perfect cover for ECB to do whatever it wants. Their answer to everything is more money.
yep, soon you can buy a house and actually get paid to do so…. These are great times !
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. –Rahm Emanuel”
Yeah its gonna really take off in war torn syria. Then throughout europe. Maybe by the time it gets hold in the us it will be summer which is not the flu season and it will get toned down. My guess at least
How about war torn Detroit or Baltimore?
And the large sickly homeless population we have on the west coast
If it’s a bioweapon I wonder if temp makes a difference?
Whether its a “bioweapon” or a “normal” it affects people in all temps.
As for those who say “bioweapon” what do you propose doing differently?
Would depend who relessed it, if they released it on purpose, and if so why they released it on purpose.