Coronavirus: A draft decree to 'quarantine 10 million people' in Lombardy | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus: A draft decree to 'quarantine 10 million people' in Lombardy

bbc.com

82 pointssmacktoward62 comments

This is only a badly embossed law proposal, which has not been approved yet. Its release to the news, is a huge mistake and it is aleeady causing havok all across the country. People are hoarding trains to go away from the supposed red zones undoubtfully spreading even further the virus.

Yeah. I suppose there is a point at which government should be truthful and also a point at which it’s better to act and then explain why.

China did it correctly, by announcing the quarantine an hour before it went into effect.

that's a terrible and harmful idea.

law makers and politicians would be well advised to give the public as much notice as possible and prepare them and educate them about what to expect mentally.

The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

is a quarantine effective if you give rich people enough time to skip town beforehand?

Where did you get "rich people" from..?

substitute rich with power and you have exactly how it plays out in China. uniformed people being in charge of those not in uniform. it will be more civilized in the West, but never for one second assume that a filthy cop who is usually happy to abuse the system when it comes to making parking tickets disappear for friends and family, or who is using the system to stalk a prospective date, ... there will be plenty of situations where if you have power you get to wield it.

Please spare us this naivete-trolling.

The world - yes even in 2020 - mostly is greased by the lubricant of money.

You won't find this in HBS case studies or find mentions of the influence of money on epidemic responses in the Lancet.

This is how the world operates - the rich mostly get their way and have apparatuses in place to be notified first in times of emergency, whether its extra-legal or not.

Italy is notorious for facilitating the ways of the old money. There are various tiers of corruption management offered by PR agencies - with armies of career diplomats, executives, liaisons of non-profits and megacorps alike, other attaches working for them - based on your ability to pay for it; tinpot republics cant afford the PR of richer nations like Italy where its kept hush hush.

The former "Bunga Bunga" Prime Minister was ( and is ) a multi-billionaire and a close friend of Putin. Italy's oldest bank was embroiled in a huge scandal that in all likelihood you probably haven't heard a peep about. Not to mention the lengthy list of Italian wealth-hiders revealed in the Panama Papers.[1] [2] [3]

If we had a media that gave a fair shake to all dollar value scandals equally you would read and watch reports on these just as often as the ones that the media is preoccupied with.

Somehow the media doesn't care to shine enough light on the dealings of your average Berlusconis or Gerhard Schröders ( former Chancellor of Germany ) or Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. [4][5][6]

Perhaps we should stop putting certain countries on a pedestal because of how much we are enamored of, of their histories and our fondness for their culture in general.

You are making a value judgment that some seediness engaged in, by some countries is okay whereas others deserve the full glare of media exposure.

It's plainly wrong and history will find you culpable for it.

[1] Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin: the odd couple

https://www.ft.com/content/2d2a9afe-6829-11e5-97d0-1456a776a...

[2] Panama Papers: Italians Involved, from Trulli to Montezemolo

https://www.corriere.it/english/16_aprile_04/panama-papers-i...

[3] Why Deutsche Bank's Monte Paschi Scandal Still Matters

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-11/why-de...

[4] How a $450 Million Loss Was Hidden From Sight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtuRDmkm_7E

[5] Anger as German ex-chancellor Schroeder heads up Rosneft board

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41447603

[6] Why Putin's Pal, Germany's Ex-Chancellor Schroeder, Isn't On A Sanctions List

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/18/601825131/...

edit: changed naive to naivete

For some reason, I feel that minimizing "fears, frustration, boredom" (as your paper says) is less important than minimizing infections and deaths.

of course it is less important and shouldn't be blocking the quarantine to be carried out.

But we had enough time in all the Western countries by now which most didn't use the opportunity to educate their public.

the effects / shock / stress from quarantine will be much higher than when you discuss it openly with people and educate them.

it's negligent to just force anyone into isolation without telling them about the effects of isolation and steps to avoid anxiety or panic.

imagine if you can't tell your environment about what happened to you or you get caught in another city. what if you have a pet waiting at home to be fed. etc ...

Sure for some all this can be sorted out as it unfolds, but it sure doesn't have to be done like this.

There have been weeks in fact where Italians, Europeans had time to discuss these scenarios, and educate their constituents.

What? The entire reason the subthread you’re participating in exists is because the person who started it believes that giving the public notice in advance is a mistake that fundamentally defeats the purpose of a quarantine. In other words, it’s a terrible and harmful idea. But I guess you’re saying it’s the quarantines themselves that are terrible and harmful because they hurt the precious feelings of individuals who want to be free to leave?

you utterly missed the point of what I was saying, as I just pointed out to sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22517206

Letting people escape a quarantine because you give a large heads-up on it defeats the whole purpose of quarantine.

I never suggested letting people go or getting rid of quarantine, that's ludicrous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22517206

> About 5 million residents left Wuhan before the lockdown because of the deadly coronavirus epidemic and the Spring Festival holiday, mayor Zhou Xianwang revealed

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047720/chin...

Seems reasonable to implement cancelations of movies, public gatherings, weddings, funerals etc. The best we can do is slow it down until there is a vaccine.

"Flattening the curve"[1] has a huge impact on mortality rates, just because people may not personally need hospitalization doesn't mean it won't save lives by reducing the strain on the healthcare systems.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESizCK7UYAAxIBa?format=jpg&name=...

This is pretty key. Halving the rate of transmission doesn't sound too impressive, but it can decrease mortality by 80%+. That's why you got very scary mortalities in Hubei (3%+) and serious but less apocalyptic elsewhere (<0.5%).

COVID-19 is highly treatable, but it has to be treated.

At this point new cases in China are declining. They may have misstepped seriously at first but their heavy handed response seems to be working out now.

From what they tell us.

You mean hiding the numbers..?

If not, it's just hard to believe.

That's what doctors and experts who have actually visited China are telling us. Temporary hospitals are shutting down, emergency rooms are getting emptier, test queues are getting shorter, factory production, traffic, and air pollution are going back up. Ask anybody you know who lives in China, it's obvious to them.

If they're hiding the numbers, they're doing it across the board: infectious disease case numbers across the board are down, not just corona. This is true in China and in South Korea.

Let's hope so!

People I know (outside Hubei) in the megacities are already back in office (cautiously). The management felt confident enough to also request the expats to fly back and join (most had left before CNY which is when this started blowing up). So I'd say not just working but close to back on track.

Same with Singapore, due to the close family and business connections to China, there was a flurry of early cases but rapid contact tracing and quarantine has slowed the spread.

I'm in Beijing, and I spent yesterday afternoon walking through the park. I easily walked pass hundreds of people: it's fairly active. Some people were even gasp removing their masks. Cafes and restaurants are opening again. The big risk for Beijing (and the rest of the country except Wuhan) right now is importation of foreign cases.

It came at significant economic cost, but China's quarantine worked, and the processes established will likely continue to help protect China from another outbreak from re-importation.

Seems like a good course of action..?

Well, maybe it's meant to be a little gift to the railway system :)

Thanks. We've edited the title to make this clearer.

This is no longer a draft: https://www.ilpost.it/2020/03/08/coronavirus-decreto-isolame... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtoF7wagkyY

Most people can not afford to leave town

I'm from North Italy. I have read news about the definitive law and it's not a quarantine. It s a limited mobility act. It tell that you cannot exit or enter designated zones with many many exceptions... (you can if are returning to your home, you are doing it for job, if there is some kind of valid reason an so on...) With all this exceptions (practically impossible to checks on the real field) the law can be seen as only a raccomandation (and a political move) to travel only for necessity and not for entertainment.

This looks like a deja vu: Government doesn't seem to be alarmed by some virus/disease. People start getting sick. Government takes some light measure / trivialize the whole thing. Lots of people start getting sick / dying. Government implement a military lock-down.

Italy seems to be going on the same track of China. It's interesting that the rest of the world doesn't look very alarmed about these situations.

If you shift the curves over and account for population, Italy's actually about a week behind China in locking things down.

The sad thing is that even after locking everything down, you expect case numbers to continue to rise by ~100x (which is what happened in Hubei), as people get past the incubation period, infect the people they're living with, medical workers fall sick, and so on. So the only right time to impose a lockdown is before it looks like a problem at all, which is politically impossible to pull off.

They are very clearly trying to balance public health with economic losses.

It certainly doesn't help that Milan citizens are ignoring restrictive measures, bars are offering free drinks to "restart the normal life", and companies are attacking the government for the lack of profits because "it's just a flu". Meanwhile hospitals are getting swamped and are calling for selection of who should or should not have access to ICU.

# of confirmed cases in Italy on 20th of February: 3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_I...

> As of 7 March 2020, there have been 5,883 confirmed cases, 233 deaths, and 589 recoveries in Italy.

Why choose February 20th?

I think he meant that just a few weeks ago there were no cases, now there are 5000

He was giving the idea of how fast the number is growing

It is the day that growth started to occur.

Unbelievable. Does Italian government have right to lock down a whole area? Will this happen in the US?

Of course they have.

Of course, it is the government, it is all its right to manager border, let alone within its border.

It would be much harder to do this in the US because of the First Amendment enshrined right to assembly.

I mean, the CDC can try, but there will be an immediate stay on the rule by some court or another, and the Supreme Court is EXTREMELY unlikely to lift that stay, unless we're in an absolute apocalyptic crisis.

* upon further research, the main support for freedom of travel is under the Privileges and Immunities Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit..., but doesn't really matter, it's precedent either way.

Does the US not have any emergency clause? If it is truly needed, I think even the US would be able to do it.

It would; I'm not saying this is an immutable law of nature. But the threshold is going to be extremely high -- I really, really don't think a .5-1% death rate is going to sway the SC, unless they are convinced that existing measures are utterly incapable of dealing with this.

(And for good reason -- this disease could easily go on for months. If the CDC can call a mandatory quarantine, does that mean it's valid to cancel elections in the interim? For how long? These are real concerns.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_Stat...

We've been in a "state of emergency" for multiple Presidents...

It's really more the second amendment that makes it harder to do

There might be some question as to the Federal government's legal authority to impose a quarantine on people who are not actually diagnoses as sick, but it would be no problem for state or local governments to do so. The Supreme Court has ruled several times that states have that power.

Yup, Governments are sovereign over their territory.

> Does Italian government have right to lock down a whole area?

Rights do not really exist on extreme situations.

> Will this happen in the US?

Unless the virus can't spread on US territory then Yes.

Yes, and I think things are going to get bad here. It can become a police state, national guard deployed, etc. This the part in the movie where you should stock up on food, gas, and emergency supplies.

Also, at the bottom of the article is a list of 'in other developments'. The governor of new york declared a state of emergency on Friday.

Unbelievable??? The alternative is the complete collapse of the health system.

It's 16 million now.

This is an extreme overreaction for a disease which is only fatal to the elderly:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/feg5st/average_age_...

icu are already full in that region. When all icus are full, it gets fatal for a lot more people. This is why Italy is acting that way

Only fatal for the elderly seems a bit over-simplistic. The link you provided doesn’t indicate how many cases the younger population has. Also, why is it an overreaction? Elderly people should be protected too.

The issue is the high percentage of patients that require intensive care, with up to 5% needing respiratory support. This can very easily overwhelm local health systems, and cause a knock-on effect to health support to the rest of the community. The best defence governments have right now is to try and slowdown the progression of the disease, and quarantining entire regions has already been shown in China to be an effective way of doing that.

How many younger people in Italy are in intensive care? More than somebody, THAT I can tell you.

What happens when there're not enough places in intensive care units - something that is ALREADY HAPPENING in Lombardy?

We don't know yet what is happening. We don't know mortality. Several EU countries have no data or release no data about intensive care units.

But, for once, Italy is reacting quickly, even though it's got some issues (e.g. the leak to the press before the law passes). Don't play this down. WHO and others are calling for preparedness. We're taking the necessary steps. Is the world doing the same?

> This is an extreme overreaction for a disease which is only fatal to the elderly

I find this an incredibly offensive thing to say. This is unempathetic to an insane degree. I hope when you're elderly people treat you with more respect than you treat others with.

Beyond that, it's incorrect. There are fatalities in younger age groups, just at a much lower rate. Once ICU and ventilators are exhausted, the fatalities in all age brackets (except children) does go up.

Please don't do this "only the elderly" thing here. It's already a flamewar trope.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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