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Ask HN: How is actually Italy confirming SARS-Cov2 cases?

by dakrisht on 3/22/20, 4:35 AM with 33 comments

Italy is at 53,000+ confirmed cases of SARS-Cov2.

This would assume they have tested upwards of 200,000+ patients in order to get a 25% infection rate.

I'm using 25% as a conservative figure. If you liberally drop this down to 10% infected tested, we'd have to be at 500,000+ successfully administered, processed and reported RT-PCR tests.

Side note: Roche's best machines, for example, can process 4,100 RT-PCR tests in a fully automated fashion and this not just a machine on a desktop, but a full-blown assembly line operation.

Intriguing.

  • by dx034 on 3/22/20, 9:51 AM

    I'm not sure about the testing regime they use but they publish the number of people tested on a daily basis. The data is available on wikipedia [1], currently they stand at ~233,000.

    As an orientation, Germany doesn't publish aggregated numbers but federal organizations said in an interview that at the moment, ~100-150k tests per week are performed, so the positive rate there should be <5%. But I'm not sure how reliable that number is. Local test centers don't have to report all tests (just positive ones) so I'm not even sure if the government has that info.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I...

  • by DrNuke on 3/22/20, 11:19 AM

    The quick answer is any emerged, severe case or death with the suspected presence of bilateral interstitial pneumonia (which symptoms are now well known globally) is registered as a covid case. It is fair enough when hospitals are out of capacity and people just die at home. The underlying point is Lombardy is suspected to have x5-x10 active circulating covid cases, which would put mortality at the same and more coherent, global rate. The fact that co-morbidity cases are all put into the same coronavirus basket is what makes numbers so high, but please consider these are all people who would not die today without coronavirus, and there is really no allowed time or resources to make better classification when more and more cases come knocking at the door daily.

  • by VladimirGolovin on 3/22/20, 8:17 AM

    >> Roche's best machines, for example, can process 4,100 RT-PCR tests in a fully automated fashion

    What's this number? Tests conducted per day? The number of DNA patterns known to the analyzer?

  • by Jaxkr on 3/22/20, 5:57 AM

    Based on symptoms and where the people were geographically.

    One or two tests can confirm cases for a whole town. They simply (and safely) assume that all flu-like illnesses coming from a certain area are covid.

  • by ecesena on 3/24/20, 4:53 AM

    As of today they did 275,468 tests: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xAyDSpzEp3n4iiu54_XL...

    This is a post (sorry, in Italian) that describes the "strategy" adopted to test people, that of course varies by region. tl;dr: in regions like Lombardia (the most affected) they can almost only test people who really show severe signs, therefore the rate is around 38%.

    https://www.ilpost.it/2020/03/20/tampone-test-coronavirus/

    Official data is here: https://github.com/pcm-dpc/COVID-19, I just put it in a spreadsheet for easier consumption.

    Edit: forgot a link

  • by lurquer on 3/22/20, 5:37 AM

    The answer is obvious and not fairly deniable.

    But, one isn't permitted to voice it.