Europe edging towards total coronavirus lockdown - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15076073
The “sense of emergency is growing,” In a matter of days, the number of coronavirus cases in Italy more than tripled to at least 31,506 this week, and the death toll rocketed above 2,503. The outbreak—likely sparked by travelers from China—began in the north but has now spread as far south as Sicily. Hundreds more coronavirus infections have sprung up across the European Union, many of which have been traced back to Italy...
source : http://www.vikilix.com/2020/03/17/europ ... -lockdown/
#15076083
alyas wrote:the number of coronavirus cases in Italy more than tripled to at least 31,506 this week, and the death toll rocketed above 2,503.


Italy has one the oldest populations in the world, the median age is something like 48(US is 38).


Why the Coronavirus Hit Italy So Hard
The country has the second-oldest population on earth, and its young mingle more often with elderly loved ones.


Italy has been hit particularly hard, with some 2,000 deaths thus far. Overwhelmed hospital staffers have had to make devastating decisions about who to treat and who they must let perish. The reason why Italy is suffering so badly, write University of Oxford researchers in a new paper in the journal Demographic Science, may be twofold: The country has the second-oldest population on earth, and its young tend to mingle more often with the elderly, like their grandparents. Such demographic research will be critical in facing down the threat elsewhere, as more countries grapple with a deadly pandemic that’s just getting started and we learn more about how the virus is transmitted within families and communities.

In Italy, 23 percent of the population is over age 65, compared to the US, where that population is 16 percent. “Extended longevity has played some role in changing the population structure,” says University of Oxford demographer and epidemiologist Jennifer Beam Dowd, lead author of the new paper. “But it actually has most to do with how rapid the decline in fertility has been in a population.” That is, it’s affected more by Italians having having fewer children than it is by them living longer.

At the same time, young Italians tend to interact a lot with their elders. Dowd’s Italian coauthors note that young folks might live with their parents and grandparents in rural areas but commute to work in cities like Milan. Data on the composition of Italian households bears out this familial arrangement too.

https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-cor ... y-so-hard/


The good news is that a good chunk of the deaths are gonna be people who were already on death's doorstep to begin with so after the contagion starts to subside there will be a sharp drop in deaths to offset the increase brought on by the virus.

Mortality displacement denotes a temporary increase in the mortality rate (number of deaths) in a given population, also known as excess mortality or excess mortality rate. It is usually attributable to environmental phenomena such as heat waves, cold spells, epidemics and pandemics, especially influenza pandemics, famine or war.

During heat waves, for instance, there are often additional deaths observed in the population, affecting especially older adults and those who are sick. After some periods with excess mortality, however, there has also been observed a decrease in overall mortality during the subsequent weeks. Such short-term forward shift in mortality rate is also referred to as harvesting effect. The subsequent, compensatory reduction in mortality suggests that the heat wave had affected especially those whose health is already so compromised that they "would have died in the short term anyway".[1]


So a lot of these deaths aren't like a great tragedy, it's people who have lived their full span and are just departing a few weeks or months earlier than they otherwise would have.
#15076108
I don't how to say this without violating rule 2 so I'll just say [... expletive deleted. Prosthetic Conscience] your indifference to old people's unnecessary and premature deaths.

It's not a few weeks or months. An 80 yo has a life expectancy of 88.
#15076125
Sivad wrote:Italy has one the oldest populations in the world, the median age is something like 48(US is 38).

It's partly because of Italy's borderline "second world" economy. Job opportunities in Italy have traditionally been much lower in Italy than other parts of Western Europe, and as a result, the population has had fewer children. It's difficult to raise children in Italy, it's difficult for them to be able to get started on a career and go off on their own. So fewer children mean a more aging overall population.

Well actually Europe isn't looking so good either; it's just the statistics are obscured by a huge amount of migration; many of those younger people were not born to European parents.
#15076138
AFAIK wrote:I don't how to say this without violating rule 2 so I'll just say ... your indifference to old people's unnecessary and premature deaths.

It's not a few weeks or months. An 80 yo has a life expectancy of 88.


:knife: 80 year olds in good health have years left but that's not the group I was talking about and it's not the group with the highest cfr. 80 year olds with serious underlying conditions, the group I was referring to, don't have years left to live.

[Expletive deleted. Prosthetic Conscience]
#15076141
Most of the people this virus is going to kill are the old and already sick. It might be sad to lose to your 80 year old granny or whatever but it's not exactly tragic when someone that age goes and it certainly doesn't make any sense to crash the global economy and allow governments to implement martial law just to keep the chronically olds alive for another few months.
#15076146
A recent survey analysis from Italy’s Instituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) has reported that more than 56.6% of patients who have died from Covid-19 were over 80 years old, and more than two-thirds of the patients had pre-existing chronic conditions. The most common comorbidity was hypertension, followed by ischemic heart disease and diabetes.

https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.c ... -outbreak/
#15076150
Sivad wrote:Most of the people this virus is going to kill are the old and already sick. It might be sad to lose to your 80 year old granny or whatever but it's not exactly tragic when someone that age goes and it certainly doesn't make any sense to crash the global economy and allow governments to implement martial law just to keep the chronically olds alive for another few months.

I've heard more than a few people say that this whole thing feels "rigged." I got out of the market in September of 2018 and sat through the whole up move through 2019. I was ready to short it at the top in February, and I let my PM buddy talk me out of it. He talked me out of shorting Fannie Mae at $65 back in mid-2000s too.

I've bought a lot of quality names. I'm starting to look at stuff that's been seriously beat up with the thought that there may be a serious mispricing due to panic. For example, PFGC has gone from $53 down to $11 and change. Restaurants are fucked for 90-180 days, and some will most certainly go under. The supply chain for restaurants probably won't though, especially the firms with lower debt and stronger balance sheets. 80% off is really attractive, but you have to look out 12-24 months for a big payoff. I mean it's an easy 20-30% return, but if you want to double or triple your money, you have to be willing to hold for years. Buffet has to be licking his chops right now.
Last edited by blackjack21 on 18 Mar 2020 06:02, edited 1 time in total.
#15076151
The death rate for the elderly is 21% and there is a shortage of ventilators in Italy, which was fatal for elderly patients who developed severe pneumonia. Italy may have less than a quarter of the breathing machines necessary to help patients. Italians were also caught off guard because of this earlier study which claimed that Asians are five times more susceptible to the coronavirus than Europeans. The ACE2 receptor may only be associated with lung infections and there are other co-receptors responsible for the 2019-nCov infection.

Image
Figure 1.
Single-cell analysis of normal human lung.
a. Characteristics of lung transplant donors for single-cell RNA-Seq analysis.
b. Cellular cluster map of the Asian male. All 8 samples were analyzed using the Seurat R package. Cells were clustered using a graph-based shared nearest neighbor clustering approach and visualized using a t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (tSNE) plot.

We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 985v1.full
#15076152
ThirdTerm wrote:Italians were also caught off guard because of this earlier study that claimed that Asians are five times more susceptible to the coronavirus than Europeans.

Italians who bought "woke" culture made it worse for everyone. "Wokeness" is the bane of our existence.



God how dumb the left is...
#15076157
blackjack21 wrote:I've heard more than a few people say that this whole thing feels "rigged."


I don't follow markets that closely but I've been hearing for years now how stock prices have been massively inflated from buy-backs and the like. Maybe the big banks and hedge funds figured a pandemic was the perfect cover for them to artificially induce a major "correction". They could crash the market before the giant bubble they blew popped and they wouldn't get blamed by the public for it so the government could step in to bail them out. I don't know if that makes sense because I'm not all that well versed in markets but there's no doubt the whole thing is rigged somehow so it's gotta be something like that.
#15076404
AFAIK wrote:So nearly half are under 80.


So? What % are over 75?

80% are over 65 and 66% overall have serious underlying conditions. Very few young, healthy people are dying from Chinese flu.

CDC: 80 percent of US coronavirus deaths are people 65 and older

The analysis lined up with data released by China, which showed 80 percent of deaths there were in adults aged 60 and older.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/p ... -people-65


So these boomers with their massive moral and intellectual failings, their wealth hoarding and their shit politics, are gonna plunge the whole fucking world into martial law and a massive economic depression just to save their old asses from dying a few years early. This isn't some small thing, it'll take us a decade at least to recover economically and our rights might be permanently eroded. That's a lost decade for billions of lives. Decimated communities, broken families, violence, despair, addiction, and suicide at epidemic levels. That's the price of this little public health intervention.
#15076407
and our old people, the people who's lives we're saving with this massive sacrifice, don't have the wisdom or the decency to refuse it. These are people who have completely wasted their lives on bullshit and consumerism. They've cultivated no wisdom, they have zero fucking character, and the only thing they're gonna do with the few worthless years they have left is shop and consume. So what are the lives of selfish old fools really worth? I could give a fuck if they all dropped dead.
#15076411
Sivad wrote:and our old people, the people who's lives we're saving with this massive sacrifice, don't have the wisdom or the decency to refuse it. These are people who have completely wasted their lives on bullshit and consumerism. They've cultivated no wisdom, they have zero fucking character, and the only thing they're gonna do with the few worthless years they have left is shop and consume. So what are the lives of selfish old fools really worth? I could give a fuck if they all dropped dead.


You are such a nice person, I wish I had a son like you.
I would smother him in his cot.

:roll:
#15076414
Ter wrote:You are such a nice person, I wish I had a son like you.


I actually am a very nice person and I only despise the despicable.

and just for the sake of fair play I'll say that my generation is no prize either. Just like most babies are assholes waiting to happen, my generation are just boomers waiting to happen.

@Ter you should go read your prophets, the only reason your people have survived for so long is because they had people like me telling them the ugly fucking truth about themselves. Those mad fuckers were always going on about the wrath and the reckoning and why the people deserved it. Most cultures shut those kinds of raving misanthropes down but the Jews survived because they heeded the truth of it. I read the prophets all the time, they're my favorite literature.
#15076436
blackjack21 wrote:Italians who bought "woke" culture made it worse for everyone. "Wokeness" is the bane of our existence.



God how dumb the left is...

Some are dumb, but some are evil and knew exactly what they were doing. Western Liberals in collusion with the World Health Organisation, deliberately and systematically undermined any attempt to contain this to China. The moment they were sure they had they successfully spread the virus throughout the western world, they turned on a sixpence and started attacking western societies for not doing enough and praising the China Communist Party dictatorship to the heavens. Of course Taiwan and Japan had no time for this Woke nonsense, hence their successful containment without completely tanking their economies.

No one's saying we should turn the clock back to the nineteen fifties, just that we should recognise the risks and costs of extreme globalism and the related costs and risks of over population. For decades now we've been lectured on the superiority of the London model. White replacement, massive, massive levels of immigration and ever increasing population levels. I can't tell you how many times we've been lectured on the need for mass immigration to run our health service. Yet where are the leading centres for disease spread in Britain, its London and Brighton, the latter being the Gay capital of Britain.

I'd be interested to know where the main decease spreading areas are in the United States, I haven't studied the matter but I'd be willing to bet its not West Virginia.
#15076782
Sivad wrote:
I don't follow markets that closely but I've been hearing for years now how stock prices have been massively inflated from buy-backs and the like. Maybe the big banks and hedge funds figured a pandemic was the perfect cover for them to artificially induce a major "correction". They could crash the market before the giant bubble they blew popped and they wouldn't get blamed by the public for it so the government could step in to bail them out. I don't know if that makes sense because I'm not all that well versed in markets but there's no doubt the whole thing is rigged somehow so it's gotta be something like that.


That's a bit of a stretch, I think wall street just got lucky on this one. They didn't conspire to cause this.

That said, I do agree with the general sentiment that we are blowing this virus out of proportion. People are behaving like anyone that catches this will die, when this is clearly no true.
#15076872
The coronavirus pandemic may have devastating effect on the economy of Italy which is hit hardest. Spain could be close behind it. Italy was already in high debt before the virus hit. It seems young Italians and Spaniards will be fleeing their countries to find jobs elsewhere in the EU. Greece has become a refugee camp. The outlook of the southern EU is bleak. The middle part of EU around Germany will probably recover fastest. Recovery of northern EU will depend on how fast an effective vaccine will be found.
#15076891
fokker wrote:The coronavirus pandemic may have devastating effect on the economy of Italy which is hit hardest. Spain could be close behind it. Italy was already in high debt before the virus hit. It seems young Italians and Spaniards will be fleeing their countries to find jobs elsewhere in the EU. Greece has become a refugee camp. The outlook of the southern EU is bleak. The middle part of EU around Germany will probably recover fastest. Recovery of northern EU will depend on how fast an effective vaccine will be found.


Italy will likely get a bailout from China, since they are bed with China (belt road busniess). I guess Spain could get in on that too.
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