Coronavirus Dan welcomes 250 Italian stallions

The Grand Prix matters more than Melbournian lives to Premier Dan Andrews, via Domain:

Ferrari’s Formula One team received a special exemption from the Italian government to travel to Melbourne from the coronavirus-struck Lombardy region.

Dozens of the team’s crew have already arrived for this week’s grand prix, with the team’s top brass – including its principal and head engineers – departing from Milan on Monday morning.

About 150 Ferrari crew members will be at Albert Park, a reduced figure for a race meet with some non-essential staff remaining in Europe.

Ferrari’s base – where most employees have been for the past week – is in Maranello, near the city of Modena, in northern Italy.

…About 100 employees of Alpha Tauri – another Italian team – and Pirelli – an Italian tyre manufacturer – have also arrived in Melbourne from Italy.

Are the Italians, who are arriving directly from the current global epicenter of COVID-19, going to be confined to barracks? There is no report suggesting so. Yet in Italy nobody can move now:

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte introduced on Monday tough measures in a bid to tackle the spread of the so-called Wuhan coronavirus. According to the prime minister, all schools and universities in Italy will be closed until April. Italian authorities also impose restrictions on free movement across the nation without any serious proven reasons. Conte also said that all sports events, including football matches, will be canceled. All public events will be also banned amid the ongoing spread of the coronavirus.

And Italians are now the number one global super spreader:

Yet Australia has banned Chinese, Koreans and Iranians but NOT Italians. In a world full of racism virue signalling, that looks more like a geniune case.

More importantly, let’s recall the lesson of Philadelphia versus St Louis in the Spanish Flu of 1918:

We noted that, in some cases, outcomes appear to have correlated with the quality and timing of the public health response. The contrast of mortality outcomes between Philadelphia and St. Louis is particularly striking (Fig. 1). The first cases of disease among civilians in Philadelphia were reported on September 17, 1918, but authorities downplayed their significance and allowed large public gatherings, notably a city-wide parade on September 28, 1918, to continue. School closures, bans on public gatherings, and other social distancing interventions were not implemented until October 3, when disease spread had already begun to overwhelm local medical and public health resources. In contrast, the first cases of disease among civilians in St. Louis were reported on October 5, and authorities moved rapidly to introduce a broad series of measures designed to promote social distancing, implementing these on October 7. The difference in response times between the two cities (≈14 days, when measured from the first reported cases) represents approximately three to five doubling times for an influenza epidemic. The costs of this delay appear to have been significant; by the time Philadelphia responded, it faced an epidemic considerably larger than the epidemic St. Louis faced. Philadelphia ultimately experienced a peak weekly excess pneumonia and influenza (P&I) death rate of 257/100,000 and a cumulative excess P&I death rate (CEPID) during the period September 8–December 28, 1918 (the study period) of 719/100,000. St. Louis, on the other hand, experienced a peak P&I death rate, while NPIs were in place, of 31/100,000 and had a CEPID during the study period of 347/100,000. Consistent with the predictions of modeling, the effect of the NPIs in St. Louis appear to have had a less-pronounced effect on CEPID than on peak death rates, and death rates were observed to climb after the NPIs were lifted in mid-November (7–9).

It appears the plan of Victorian authorities is to kill as many locals as possible in the shortest available time.