The news from Italy today is especially tragic given that the daily death toll rose to 133. But there's something that makes this look even more awful - and that's the very high ratio between deaths and confirmed cases in Italy. This suggests that a large proportion of the C virus cases in Italy have not been discovered - and therefore that the fact that the outbreak is, currently, dangerously out of control is related to this lack of discovery. This may well signal a very big lack in testing for infection in Italy, if not elsewhere.
In fact, according to the official statistics the fatality rate of confirmed cases in Italy, at 5 per cent, is rather higher than than the fatality rate of China, which is 3.8 per cent. Indeed the death rate among Italian cases appears to be getting higher.
Now, once one has excluded the possibility that the virus circulating in Italy is more virulent that the one circulating in China (elsewhere in Europe the death rate is much smaller than in Italy, so this seems unlikely) the one very concenring conclusion is that a very large proportion of the C virus cases in Italy have not been discovered. This has serious implications for controlling the spread of infection. The difference between the death rate in Italy and China may be partly or wholly concerned with the significantly higher average age of people in Italy compared to China. However, even if this explains all of the difference (I would be surprised if it did), Italy (and most other countries to a greater or lesser extent) are still falling well short of 'best practice' in testing, which is set by South Korea at the moment.
If we want to look for a country where a comprehensive testing programme has been conducted, we should look at South Korea. There has been a similar number of confirmed cases in S. Korea as in Italy. However, whilst, as of February 8th, there were 266 deaths in Italy, there were only 50 deaths in South Korea. Again, if we dismiss the idea that there is a different virus circulating in one of the two countries we can only assume that the death rate compared to confirmed infections is, using the S. Korean statistics, around 0.7 per cent.
The South Korean figures (garnered as a result of mass, often random, testing, as opposed to the much more apparently limited Italian testing) offer a little crumb of comfort in that the death rate is lower than some fears. However it also highlights the yawning likely gap between Italian official data and the much larger likely scale of the epidemic in Italy.
People have been discussing the implications of the rapidly increasing scale of the outbreak in Italy, but one lesson seems obvious to me. There needs to be a big increase in testing, most of all in Italy, but also in all other countries. If you don't know who has the disease, you don't know who their contacts are, and you cannot easily close off the disease.
Michel Foucault said that 'power is knowledge'. He is certainly right there, and at the moment we do not have nearly enough of the knowledge that is gained through testing
Source of medical data
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Lacking beds, masks and doctors, Europe's health services struggle ... are struggling to keep on top of the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19. There are some common issues, such as a lack of testing kits to monitor the virus..
ReplyDeleteDue to the rising cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) throughout India, most parts of the country are in an extended period of lockdown. The fate of when the lockdowns are going to be lifted will get revealed soon. But, currently most of the Indian populace is homebound – including the professionals who used to go to the office every day. In this Pandemic let’s see how you can make a difference by home care & precautions.