It seems to be getting better but too early to judge.
Lombardy has been hit hard, with Bergamo and Brescia provinces being the worst places, but numbers have been improving.
Other regions have their ups and downs but so far nothing similar to Lombardy, it seems that lockdown has been effective in containing the spread and keeping it mostly within our region.
But we’re having warm sunny days and the risk of people loosening distancing is high, there’s already more and more people around even here in Lombardy.
As I said, too early to judge, we can expect strict measures to go on util July or so, at least.
Should be mentioned, it seems to me that here lockdown was enforced more strictly than in the US. People aren’t allowed to move from region to region, then they could move outside of their municipalieties only for work, health, food shopping or serious reasons, there are police checks in the streets and everyone has to carry a paper declaring why they’re outside of their home if they get checked - and police asks proof, too. Being outside for no valid reason can result in a fine, and if a positive person that should have been home in quarantine is caught outside, they can be penally charged (something like “voluntary epidemic” or such).
Businesses like restaurants, clubs, hotels and such have been immediatly shut down, mass gatherings of any kind were prohibited (including church services and such), schools were closed right from the start, productive/manufacturing businesses are still running.
Not sure how’s the lockdown being enforced in the US but I understand that small gatherings are still allowed, people can move from state to state and so forth.
As for the rest, we’re lagging behind. I think we handled it “decently” at the start, with the lockdown and such, but our government is stalling hard on other matters, like supporting businessess, getting people back to work and protective gear supplies.
Rest of Europe, meh.
Spain is on a deadly tangent, in a few days they’ll have worse numbers than ours, situation is critical there. Wish we were in a better situation here to help them out.
France just recently updated their numbers since they were only counting positives and deaths in hospitals, i.e. they didn’t take into account people dying in retirement homes or at home, adjusted like this their number have spiked too.
Note that Spain, France, UK and Netherlands all have a death rate around 10% now.
I would also be careful (seen a few links in other threads) when posting articles about northern european countries like Sweden, Norway or Iceland, since they provide no useful context. Those countries cover a large area, with a small population and density, people can’t really apply their situation to those of other countries with high density.
Just to give an idea, Iceland has something like the population of two italian regions, spread over an area of fifteen italian regions. They have tested something like 20.000 people and made a study case of asymptomatic positives being 50% - too bad that out of the 20.000 people they tested, 1% were positive (180, precisely), and 50% of them asymptomatic (90).
So, yeah, I wouldn’t take studies like that seriously.
