Strangelove wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2024 3:32 pm
Topper wrote: ↑Mon Jun 03, 2024 10:44 pm
the response was very adhoc in an effort to avoid the Italian outcome.
I don't pay much attention to these things, but I understood the Italian outcome was originally grossly overstated.
Yes and no.
Italy was the first European country hit by covid, and at first they did not know what hit them. There were two initial sources, two Chinese businessmen that fell sick in Rome, and an Italian returning from Wuhan that fell sick somewhere in Lombardy, iirc.
In February of 2020 hospitals in northern Italy were overwhelmed with severly ill people, at least a hundred thousand confirmed cases and initially a fatality rate over 10%. This is when the panic spread across Europe. Borders were closed, curfews imposed, etc.
Now, hospitals stepped up their game, experimental treatments showed what worked and what didn't work. I also believe the virus weakened over time. And of course the successful effort to bring out a vaccine in record time helped reduce the number of fatalities greatly. When summed up now the covid fatality rate in Italy over the course of the pandemic was a mere 0.74%, which while still roughly 30 times higher than your average flu season, is far less alarming than the initial numbers.
What Topper is pointing out is that in the early days of the pandemic, we were seeing these vivid pictures of people dying on the sidewalks outside the hospitals in Italy, and this is what everyone was afraid of. Thus many countries took drastic measures to try to prevent that from happening.
In Sweden the number of ICU beds quadrupled over just a matter of weeks, often at the expense of operating theatres, which is probably the reason I live today. I spent 14 days in the ICU, ten of them intubated while in a coma. If Sweden had not made sure to increase ICU facilities that rapidly, chances are that I could not have gotten the care I needed, which is probably what happened early on in Italy, and why so many of the early covid patients died.
So, yes, in hindsight the Italian outcome was nowhere near as bad as it looked initially, but those early weeks really were a disaster and loads of people died, including hospital staff. And that is what the evidence was when the early decisions were made by Fauci and others.
