Luckily I’m not. But most businesses are still closed throughout all Italy, even outside of what’s called here the “red zone.”
It doesn’t appear as though they have given up, it looks more like they are trying to fight it with every possible means they have but aren’t managing to.
They are bombarding TV channels with ads on “the ten most important rules to keep the virus away,” which include… Washing your hands and avoiding overcrowded places. They are enforcing quarantine on whoever has been exposed to someone who has the virus or has been to a place marked as red zone.
It does indeed look like they are fighting the spread, but the virus is winning. My guess is they waited too long to apply the more restricting measures and we’ve come to a point of no return where the rate of spread has exponentially grown to be too fast to outpace. But I hope I’m wrong.
I’ve heard that, here in Canada, they are preparing for a more community based approach to the pandemic than a hospital based one. Hospitals would only be for the severely ill and, the more mild cases, which seem to be the vast majority of patients, would be rerouted to special, possibly temporary sites such as community centres or larger medical clinics that have been set up for mild coronavirus cases. Presumably, these facilities would assess and give medical advice and reassurance before sending these patients back home to self-isolate. During the H1N1 pandemic, hospital ERs were clogged up and bogged down with what were termed the “worried well”. These were the mild cases of H1N1 who didn’t need treatment, only reassurance that they were going to be okay. By rerouting these patients to non-hospital based centres, they would free up ERs and hospitals in general to treat only the severe cases.
I think the hope here in the Northern Hemisphere is that if we can keep this pandemic relatively contained for another few weeks, it will start to weaken and die out as the more mild weather arrives like most respiratory illnesses do. This would allow for the antiviral medication studies that are being done right now to return some results and hopefully allow for more preparation for the second wave which in the past has occurred in the next fall/winter.
Yeah, I read something about a person with the virus who spent a couple days in hospital and was then sent home and told to stay home because they weren’t too sick. The problem is that people like that will have to go out at some point to buy food, etc., or people will have to bring it to them, it’s better than them going to work and walking around at the mall but it’s not exactly containing the virus.
The medical system is much more messed up than back in the H1N1 days, they couldn’t even try to put everyone in a hospital if they wanted to. I’m pretty sure I had H1N1, I was coughing so much that there was blood in my phlegm but other than that I didn’t feel too bad and I still went to work because I didn’t really have a choice.
A little update from my corner of the world: the government just announced that, effective as of tomorrow, all national territory is proclaimed red zone.
This means all businesses such as restaurants, gyms, certain shops, as well as churches, schools, and so on are going to be closed until April, the 3rd.
People cannot travel between regions unless it’s to go to work, and several other restrictions are in place to prevent aggregations. Italy has effectively been shut down. If this doesn’t stop the virus from spreading further, I don’t know what will.
Source:
It’s in Italian but if you use an online translator you can probably make sense of it.
As an aside fun fact (which is not fun at all): there have been several protests in jails all over the country. Inmates are demanding amnesty because they are afraid they are gonna be infected without a possibility to escape the disease. Some jails have been taken over by inmates, forcing the guards to run out (some of them appear to have been taken hostage), and there have been 7 deaths—all prisoners—from overdoing on meds (because they assaulted prisons’ pharmacies). Law enforcement officers are having a really hard time containing the protests, and many prisoners (41) have managed to evade. Some cities have been reported have escaped inmates going around stealing cars and goods. It’s chaos.
There’s a park in my city which will probably stay open. It’s got a pullup bar, so there’s that. It’s better than nothing but this is really frustrating. I’ll have to resort to doing push-ups and pull-ups only, maybe bodyweight lunges and the such. As long as I can avoid regression, I’m happy. Some studies have shown that it takes longer than this to start losing muscle mass. Anyhow, there probably isn’t much else I can do about it, save for trying to find someone that trains at home with appropriate equipment and paying them to use it (very unlikely, I don’t know anyone that has a home gym).
No one knows for sure. My father is a police officer and told me that, a few weeks before this exploded here, a couple of airplanes with a few hundred Chinese people coming back from China after a holiday that takes place at this time of the year there (Chinese new year’s? Is that what it’s called?) landed in the region of Tuscany, and apparently the local authorities took it easy with the checks. They didn’t test them for the virus and just let them go.
The general sentiment seems to be that the government hasn’t been strict enough with the measures and now it’s too late.
Another version is that some other European countries might be hiding some of the data and the situation there wouldn’t be that different than here, and some of those countries like Germany and France seem to be on their way to taking similar measures to those we’re seeing here.
Keep your overall health up and follow the advice from the public health experts but don’t panic. It’s extremely important to keep things in perspective during this epidemic because there is very little perspective in the media reporting on it. I know they have a responsibility to keep the public informed but I think they’ve gone a little overboard with having 24 hr a day body counts on every news headline. Basically, if your life would be in danger from influenza in any given flu season, then it may be in danger from this coronavirus. If it wouldn’t, then it likely won’t be. Should we take precautions to prevent getting this? Absolutely. But you should take those same precautions for the flu too. And remember, even though China has been by far the hardest hit by this virus, only 0.006% of their popular has contracted it. Would it have been much worse if they hadn’t applied the mass quarantine measures that they did ( and that Italy has)? Undoubtedly. That’s why it’s important for public health departments to exist and for governments to listen to them. But stay focused on the numbers here in absolute terms. I’ll be praying for you and your countrymen and I’m sure very soon Italy will rebound stronger than ever. It’s surprising how during and after these national crises, a strengthened sense of unity and goodwill often flourishes. Good luck and look at is a government enforced reload!
This isn’t the case. Most hospitals have a legal obligation to help you, even if you come in with no health insurance. They can bury you in debt afterwards, unfortunately, but there are also reduced or charity care options at hospitals. I don’t much like the healthcare system in the US, so this isn’t much of a defense of it, just letting you know you’re not getting turned away with no health insurance.
Absolutely agreed. If you look at my other posts in this thread, I was criticizing the whole mass hysteria that stemmed from this situation and I HATE the way journalists are exploiting this.
Personally, I am not afraid of the virus. Worried for those around me, especially for the more vulnerable individuals? Absolutely. Worried for the impact the measures are going to have on my life and that of those around me? Also, to be honest.
Thank you man, it’s very kind of you.
I think this is one of the mechanisms that allowed our species to survive thus far. We instinctively come closer together when a common bad situation arises.
Thank you for educating me on this. I was suspecting that things were not quite this way. For some reason, though, that’s the picture we tend to get over here. “If you get sick in the US, they will check your health insurance before they even touch you.”
Wrt hospitals (and doctors), if you tell them you can pay with a credit card or even cash, they’ll treat you even better than if you have insurance. The insurance companies negotiate prices down as much as they can. The hospitals (or private doctors) will charge you their standard prices, and then give you a “discount”, because that is still more than what the insurance companies will pay.
This is in case the hospital does not have an agreement with your specific health provider; because that means your specific health provider will refuse to pay, and the hospital will be stuck coming after you for payment (which usually means they’re out of luck).
Sad yes but a reality of the click bait times we live in. This is far from the only thing that gets sensationalized but now oh goodie we have connected people all across the world. At the same time that communication is precisely what will help prevent these type of things from becoming global issues so it’s a double edged sword in that sense.
60 years ago you wouldn’t have heard of it at this point, but it’d have a far better chance of spreading in mass and a better chance of death.
So, just heard that the building we live in has a resident with a confirmed case of covid 19. We have a 5-month old baby, is there any information out there on cases with infants or kids? I only read that it’s deadly on older people and ones with existing diseases. And thanks for the tips @flappinit
The honest truth is that this is some serious shit for anyone over 60, and doubly so if you also have pre-existing conditions. For the rest of us, it is about safeguarding those people. And hoarding toilet paper, apparently. Possibly to be used as a permanent form of currency in the post-corona world.
