Perhaps Italians also visit their (grand)parents more than in Asian countries, or the old people are still going to public places more?
Extended families are traditional in China, but the move out of the provinces to the large cities to the east has resulted in many parents leaving their children in the care of the grandparents. So in a place like Wuhan, I would guess there are fewer old people than in the rural areas where the virus would not be so common, though I'm not sure of this.
One of the first, very important advices should be: cut visits to older people, and stay at home if you don't feel 100% (and also implement measures that make this possible, like food services to old people, paid sick leave, etc.). This, I believe, would do much more good than closing all schools and more of these coarse measures that seem to be more about "look, we're taking harsh measures" than about reasoned action.
I don't know about that. Many kids are going to be presymptomatic or asymptomatic, and we still don't know for sure how efficiently they may spread the virus. Remember, one infected child going home has a multiplier effect, putting all the members of his/her family at immediate risk. Also, education is one activity that can be carried out fairly effectively online, or with home schooling in some cases. It's not like many jobs, where you physically have to show up.
Shedding usually does infer infectivity. But in this case, it is viral RNA, not an enveloped virus. I think that is a nuance that would be clarified during peer review. Their main evidence was that swabs from the later time points did not yield anything capable of infecting cell cultures while being PCR positive.
Makes sense. Let me take the opportunity, for people wringing their hands (literally!) over hand sanitizers, that plain old household soap or detergent will work fine. Most proteins are denatured by detergents, and the virus needs these proteins to invade cells and start replicating.
That Iran story you linked is horrifying. I wondered about all the public officials who tested positive (one of them one day after giving a speech in which he assured the public they had nothing to worry about), but thought maybe someone positive had gone to a meeting of officials, many of whom become infected from that one source. But all the other evidence certainly points to a very high incidence of cases.
At first, I thought estimates in the millions were totally unrealistic, but after some very rough, in-the-head calculations, I see how this could be possible, whether or not likely. The first case of the virus emerged in China in early December. Let's assume that someone from Hubei traveled to Iran within a week of that, so the outbreak began there not long after it did in China. We know the Chinese government tried to suppress information about the outbreak, so even if the Iran government did also--or if they just hadn't realized what was going on at the time--the virus in Iran probably would not have spread any faster than it did in China. But it certainly could have paralleled that spread. The number of cases in Hubei started to slow down at about 60,000, around a month ago. We assume that the same number of cases, more or less, existed in Iran at the time, but without the restrictions the Chinese imposed, the cases in Iran continued to grow. Assuming a reasonable increase of 10% per day, the number of cases would double in about a week, and increase roughly sixteen times in a month. That gets them to roughly a million cases now. If the virus began somewhat later in Iran, that number would be smaller, on the other hand, if the rate of spread was faster, it could be higher.
This is purely speculative, but it does indicate that a million cases in Iran is not unthinkable. Note, though, that the first cases were reported there last month, and the reported number has increased roughly in parallel with those in S. Korea and Italy, which began about the same time. So if there really are a million or more cases, the government, needless to say is engaging in massive deception. E.g., if they discovered that the number of cases had reached 20,000, they might have reported 20. When it hit 50,000, they said 50, and so on. In this way, the spread would appear in line with what other hotspots were reporting, while hiding the massive differences in actual cases.
www.cnbc.com
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