Uhm. I’m gonna share this. It’s an email from an Italian citizen that has been making its way around my work emails so I sincerely hope none of my coworkers googles any specific phrases in the contents but even then, hey, they probably can’t specifically doxx me. It feels worthy of sharing here in a megathread. Again, this is an email from an Italian citizen that lives in Italy that, in a very circuitous roundabout way, ended up in my inbox. Frankly I thought that most of this had been covered on the ‘ski already and admittedly mostly by kleinbl00, but this thread makes me think it’s worth sharing.

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Thank you for checking in. Around here we are mostly fine so far, but the overall situation is evolving rapidly and not in a reassuring way.

One of the main effects of this contagion is not necessarily about an individual person to be infected and develop life-threatening symptoms but that, considering the population as a whole, the number of people infected and in need of hospitalization and of intensive care (mainly because they need assisted ventilation) is increasing quickly, putting a heavy strain on the health care system.

We have come very fast, in a couple of weeks actually, from a scenario where nobody was taking this issue as a serious one (“it’s like the flu”) to the point today where the effects of the infection have mostly wiped out all the spare capacity in intensive care units in many areas of Nothern Italy (sudden higher-than-usual number with critical pneumonia conditions, mostly elderly people or people already weakened by other concurrent illnesses).

All of a sudden the number of people in need of ICU has started increasing well above both the seasonal and the long term standards used to determine how many ICU beds are needed for a given area. This created a dire scarcity of beds both for the infected people in critical conditions, and also for people who normally would have needed ICUs, putting everyone infected or not at higher risk of not being capable to get the proper care. Consider that Northern Italy's healthcare system is among the best of the world for standards, personnel, and equipment, so it’s not a local organizational or structural issue, but something that can easily happen in other western countries.

The big effort at a nation’s level right now is to try and slow down the contagion rate as much as possible. The target is to spread the number of critical cases as much as possible over time, to dilute over time the strain put on the ICUs. The idea is that, considering that as of now a widespread contagion is inevitable, if the critical cases don’t happen all at once but spread over the next months, the healthcare system can cope with them gradually without clogging the hospital ICUs.

For this reason, you are probably seeing stories talking of lockdown of the most affected areas and of a general effort to encourage and enforce so-called social distancing: schools, museums, universities, libraries, gyms, swimming pools are closed, all gatherings are either prohibited or discouraged, depending on the kind. Shops and restaurants are open but the general prescription is to avoid going out as much as possible. The authorities are trying to limit interactions between persons as much as possible to slow down the contagion, without at the same time grinding to a halt the country and the economy.

It may seem from the outside that these measures are excessive in some regards, I ensure you that they looked like that to many people here not earlier than ten days ago, but the situation in hospitals has deteriorated so quickly that, in retrospect, probably, harsher measures should have been put in place already starting from two-three weeks ago.

Sorry, I elaborated a bit on this, but looking at international news it seems that other countries are not grasping the issue, as we weren’t here until recently, so I thought that a bit of first-hand testimony from the “hot” zone would help to clarify the scenario.

Italy is probably just the first western country to be hit by this, but the situation is evolving quickly in other countries and the pattern everywhere is identical to ours, with a first moment of underestimation and then a quick realization of how critical the situation is.

Ciao,