Case study in italy
Not taking the infected to the hospital lowered the death rate in one region
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" .... Struck by a human catastrophe unseen in Europe outside of war, with military trucks taking away corpses from the city of Bergamo, Lombardy has a death rate of 17.6 per cent.
Nearby Veneto’s stands at 5.6 per cent. While virologists caution that the percentage death rate is closely tied to the level of testing, they also attribute the gap to other factors, such as Veneto’s reluctance to hospitalise compared with its neighbour.
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For Giorgio Palù, one of Europe’s leading virologists, and scientific adviser to the governor of Veneto, a critical factor has been the number of diagnosed patients taken into hospital.
The number of diagnosed patients who were taken in hospitals for clinical treatment at the start of the outbreak was about 65 per cent in Lombardy, Prof Palù said.
This compares with 20 per cent in Veneto, where the majority were told to stay at home unless urgent care was required.
“There were different instructions given to the sick by the different regional health authorities,” he said. “Yes, there has been more testing in Veneto but people were kept at home and not taken into hospitals. The more patients you admit to the hospital, the more cases you get. You create the outbreak as at the start nobody was taking care of sampling the doctors or nurses, [so] you were taking home the infection.....”