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Radio War Nerd EP #222* [REPOST] — Coronavirus Pandemic: Quarantined In Italy, with Annibale (Patreon)

Published:
2020-03-12 15:51:41
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Annibale 

Originally recorded: March 10, 2020

By popular demand from Radio War Nerd subscribers, we're reposting open & unlocked this episode on the coronavirus emergency, with our popular RWN guest, Italian historian "Annibale", on what life is like under quarantine in his home in northern Italy...and what to expect as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread. "Sobering" as they say, but necessary.

This unlocked repost of RWN Episode 222 comes to you courtesy of our Radio War Nerd subscribers, who make our weekly podcast possible. Freedom isn't free, and neither is Radio War Nerd...Sign up here on the patreon page for the Radio War Nerd podcast, the newsletter, the RSS feed, and more... 

Listen to Annibale's popular RWN series: Venetian Empire (#207, #208, #209, #214); The Hundred Years War (#175, #176, #177, #180, #182, #183); Italy's Years Of Lead (#134, #135, #136, #139); Italian Resistance in WW2 (#131)

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Comments

Quaglar_The_Destroyer

You know, for the RWN version of On The Medias "Breaking News Bulletin" I gotta say I prefer yours. I'm not normally a paranoid person, but my mom just found out she's gonna have a round of chemo in like 2 months, my wife's classes were all switched to online for like 2 weeks, and I work from home on a mostly nocturnal schedule (long stretches of private time to worry). Hearing y'all acknowledge & validate the low grade freak out sizzle in the air was exactly what I needed. Bitching about how America is precisely the sort of socially inert hellscape where something like that would thrive helped me identify a lot of the passive worrying I have been doing concerning this news. Well? Gotta go to church! We got dippers or sippers in the house? God bless.

MoldyTolge

Two weeks? They’re talking about writing off the rest of my school’s semester. But as a commuter student, it’s really more of a blessing than a curse.

Ed C.

Is it possible to get a download link for this so I can listen on my phone?

Quaglar_The_Destroyer

I have always used this website via app, but i think that might work on your phone?

Ed C.

I didn't even know Patreon had an app! I've always used RSS feeds in my podcast app (Overcast).

A Patreon of the Ahts

What movie was it please where there is a post-apocalyptic talk show?

Benjamin Cheney

Dawn of the Dead (the George Romero original not the remake)

Ben Hosen

Thanks for unlocking this. I think a few family, friends, co-workers might actually listen. “Not The Stand but not the Flu either”; I’ve been trying to explain that for weeks in both professional and personal senses. For the Nth time: thanks Annibale. Best regards and good health to you Sir.

James Hardwidge

A serious thanks for unlocking this. Knowledge is power! Stay safe everyone

Eric Snow

John - you mentioned having problems exercising with a bad knee. I have other health issues and I ordered a cheap bike online.

Eric Snow

Sorry for the very long link. Also, I don't know if this is the forum for these messages, or if you prefer the Facebook group for this type of stuff.

Eric Snow

This is not Vietnam. There are rules.

Factory Troll

Regarding the spread of Covid-19 in tropical countries and the 3rd world (besides the US); The theories of reduced spread in warm weather seem really speculative and baseless, as Annibale hints at during the interview. Countries in the temperate zone happen to be the wealthiest countries on earth where people travel the most, for business or tourism, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a virus to spread there first. I have spent most of the last two years in a Malawian village, and when you stay there, especially when you stay there without money, Italy might as well be another moon of Saturn. There are probably thousands of people traveling between Italy and Scandinavia for every person traveling between Italy and Malawi, so when Scandinavia have 3,000 – mostly imported – cases while Sub-Saharan countries have 0, 1 or 2 cases each, I can’t see anything strange about those stats. I have seen some people express optimism about African countries ability to tackle this epidemic. In terms of the first line of defense – airport screenings, follow up of initial cases etc. – this might be a warranted optimism. But once you move out into the districts and the countryside, the level of preparedness is pretty close to zero, as in 14th century Europe level of preparedness (ok, that might be an exaggeration, I can’t really speak for the 14th century, but it’s bad). This comment will be too long if I try to list all the reason why a country like Malawi won’t be able to defeat this virus, but for starters; the thought of quarantining a Malawian village is absurd and implausible. Fortunately, there aren’t too many people aged 60+ in Sub-Sahara, nonetheless, there is a significant population of middle age people with a dubious health record (btw: does anyone know of data/research about Covid-19 in conjunction with HIV or malaria?). This is a new situation and I might of course be wrong, but you can count me surprised if the death toll in Africa alone does not reach seven figures.

JoR

The point mark made about America's sick time situation is pretty pertinent. I'm unsure about how places have reacted in terms of allowing extra sick pay if you're infected: the answer is probably no. The place I currently work at full time basically cannot close (its related to Healthcare, but not person to person, don't want to elaborate too much but basically the place will allow you to stay home if you're infected without getting fired, but since I have no sick pay this won't do much in terms of paying bills). I'm younger and no affected yet so hopefully this won't be a problem. But for my parents it's definitely something to worry about as they're both in the 50-60 range and work in grocery stores. Even now as most schools/businesses in America are closing, grocery stores are staying open (and thriving, at least financially). So far they're not sick, but they're in the potential age group that's affected more often, and they're around hundreds of people a day potentially, at least. So the episode was illuminating, thank you for that, but definitely worrisome. I'll definitely keep asking them if they have any of the underlying symptoms, hopefully testing for it becomes easy to access (I somewhat understood the point about testing, but in general it confuses me I'll have to relisten and research). But again thanks for this episode, especially bringing Annibale on. At first the inner skeptic in me just viewed the pandemic as mostly hyperbole and exaggeration, but you guys really cleared things up.

online Leftist Archive Project (LARP)

At the place I work, policies were put in place but implementation has been spotty at best. A lot was left up to individual managers to decide. They'd like managers to get more people to work from home, but they're leaving it up to their discretion. For the most part there's pretty much no mandatory work from home policies yet. In fact my gf has to use Paid Time Off since she's a graphic artist and so according to her manager still HAS to come in. So no work-from-home for her. I do wish that NJ would be stricter on businesses so we don't have to make these kinds of choices, it's really sort of crummy especially to people who've worked here a long time. They're trying to come up with sensible policies, I guess, but it's kind of a s***show.

Sophia Monday

Thanks for making this public. Listening to this episode last week may very well have saved some of my family members' lives. It knocked some sense into me, and when I explained the triage situation, I at least freaked my immunocompromised mother into self-isolating, even from me. We're yet to see the community spread so much here in Victoria, Australia - as yet, but given that the behaviours have been only slightly less irresponsible than in other places, I just hope we haven't been too late.

Factory Troll

Pakistan's PM, Imran Khan, becomes the first world leader to basically say "we can't shut down our country, and we won't". Lockdowns and quarantines may be exotic to the population of tame European countries (Italy, Sweden etc.) and seem like perfectly acceptable measures, given the context of a dangerous pandemic. But in many, if not most other countries in the world, curfew, lockdown, martial law, declaration of emergency etc. are weapons of the state, tools used by the government to clamp down on troublesome segments of its population. Khan may not be fit for a statesman, but he’s undoubtably a shrewd politician and it seems like a perfectly sensible move to proactively declare Covid-19 an unavoidable natural disaster, as opposed to sending police and army into the streets to enforce an open-ended nationwide lockdown. The latter could conceivably turn into a very dangerous situation, not at least for him personally, and may not even be enough to stop the epidemic. Now there is call for other countries, mostly in the developing world, to also take “aggressive measures” against the spread of the disease. Which begs the question; has anyone sat down and thought through what repercussions “aggressive measures” could have in a politically fragile country? Things could turn really grim, and truly chaotic, if countries in Asia, Africa and Latin-America start to enforce curfews and lockdowns which are supposed to go on for months on end (heck, it could even be the case in Europe and the US). Its a pandora’s box, and the blowback will be on a scale which “no one could have anticipated”, as they say. The lesson from China is not lockdown and authoritarianism, the lesson is to be a tightly, tightly organized society with the ability to enforce something like a lockdown in a timely and appropriate manner.

radiowarnerd

Thanks for the suggestion. At the moment, my knee is being nice for some reason. There's probably a medical reason but I prefer to explain it in terms of my usual demon-based cosmology.

radiowarnerd

Hey, didn't we meet you in Kuala Lumpur? And you told us that 1349 was the biggest year in Norwegian history because, thanks to the Black Death, Norwegian history basically ended at that point. BTW, have you heard that there's a Norwegian band called 1349? I'm sure you're right about Malawi. The only reason I had to take the tropical hypothesis seriously is that we spent a month on the 36th floor of a Bangkok high rise full of Chinese tourists and didn't get sick, but two cases probably aren't statistically significant. It was probably just dumb luck.

radiowarnerd

Thanks! Frankly, that episode convinced me to take it seriously too. Scared the Hell out of me.

radiowarnerd

I hear some scary stories, one about a young woman who's worked for a big hotel chain for years and was just told she has to take an unpaid 90-day furlough, which may be extended indefinitely. That's a new way of saying you're fired, I guess.

radiowarnerd

Dear Quaglar, I'm pretty sure that sense of every man for himself has a lot to do with the panic. You just can't sustain that Libertarian stuff during a pandemic, and when it evaporates what's left is profitable indifference, malign neglect. Since that's hard to face, a lot of people will try desperately to find something else to be angry and frightened about, virtually anything.

Richard J Hobin Jr

Facebook post from a local doctor...... The virus is here, it’s arrived in Vernon County. We don’t have any confirmed positives as of this writing but I have seen patients who have it, I am certain. There’s something more you can do to prepare: Talk with the ones you love, and do it now. Talk to them about what should be done if they, or you, get a severe case of the virus. This is pretty grim stuff, but you need to understand it. Here it goes: • Most people, about 80%, will have a mild case. They will have fever and cough, feel like it’s a bad case of the flu, maybe be a little short of breath. It will feel like no big deal. This includes some older patients; it isn’t true that all older people get a severe form of the disease. • About 1 in 5 will be so sick they need hospitalization. This can last for several days or even weeks. (This includes a lot of younger and middle-aged adults, everyone but young kids.) The hospitals will be overcrowded once this hits in full, rooms will be doubled up, staff will be short, the care will be much less good than it should be because there aren’t enough people to do it perfectly. • About 5% will become severely ill: their oxygen levels will drop to critical levels. This comes on suddenly, 10-14 days after the start of symptoms, often in people who seems like they’re recovering well. They will have tremendous difficulty breathing. Their blood pressure may drop, maybe a third will develop heart failure, some will get kidney failure. They need intensive support, and a high proportion of them will require intubation and mechanical ventilation, for an average of 2 weeks (meaning some are longer.) There are tremendous numbers of complications that happen, including bed sores, pneumonia on top of the virus, malnutrition, and especially the strain it puts on the brain. People will be delirious. For many the emotional strain will be beyond imagination, and many will become psychotic. It will be hard to know how much pain they are in. And there will not be enough staff to do the care as it should be done: there will simply be too many people in intensive care and on ventilators. • Despite all of this, of those with severe (critical) disease, somewhere from 1 in 5 to 2 out of every 3 will die. Death is more likely for the elderly, and the older you are, the more likely death is. The more health issues you have, the more likely death is if you get the severe form. Initially there will be enough resources to care for the very sick, but it will take just a few days for all the intensive care beds to be filled, and the rate of survival will go down. For the frail elderly who survive the ventilator and leave the hospital, this is what they have to look forward to: From being on a ventilator for 2 weeks their muscles will have atrophied severely. Most will not be able to live outside of a nursing home. Many, perhaps most, will not walk again. They may have permanent lung damage from the virus. But their minds are unlikely to come through unscathed. Even if they don’t have a stroke during the illness, the prolonged delirium will take a permanent toll. They will not be the same, will not have the same mind, may not have the same personality. For the frail elderly, this is a “good outcome.” So what can you do? Have discussions with your parents, your grandparents, your spouse. If you get badly sick, do they want to go to the hospital? For most people the answer will be yes. But if they get severely ill, if they are going into respiratory distress, do you want aggressive treatment, including intubation? Our goal is to get as many people as possible through this. But often in medicine our heroic efforts amount to torturing people who later wish that we hadn’t. The alternative is comfort care, care that revolves around reducing the pain and distress without trying to extend life when it probably can’t be extended. For many this is the kindest thing we can do. But it is up to the patient, and unless you’ve had the discussion ahead of time, you won’t be in a position to speak for your loved one who is too sick to speak for herself. It isn’t enough to say that there’s advanced directives on file; you need to know what your loved one wants. These are circumstances that aren’t listed on advanced directives or living wills. And have the discussion about yourself, with your siblings, partner, or grown kids. We are seeing more people in their 20s-40s get severely ill with this, and some are dying. And finally, be aware that we may refuse to intubate someone or to try heroic measures. If someone has a low probability of surviving we will refuse to do futile care and keep the ventilator for someone who has a chance of surviving. As I said earlier, I’m not interested in torturing people for false hope. Loving someone means caring about what’s best for them, not how hard it is for you to let go. Loving someone means helping them to face their illness with courage and realism. Loving someone is making sure they are not tormented for no reason.

Roger Kamben

Regardless how serious you think the virus is it's important to not go overboard and make the "cure" worse than the "disease". Political and economic turmoil have the potential of hurting far more people, especially in developing nations. Remember the amount of corona deaths in the past 3 months is way less than normal flu season of more than 100thousand dead globally in the same period. The threat seems overblown and is now turning into a power/cash grab by the 0.1% See links at the bottom of this page for more info: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

Annibale

Sorry but the notion that Corona is killing way fewer people than flu is totally wrong. At the top of the flu season, Lombardy's death rate was +/ - 300 people per day. Now is more than doubled, and Bergamo has just announced they're going out of coffins to bury people. So please don't rely on that idea - it's wrong. Coronavirus is several times more deadly than seasonal flu. Also, it has a rate of hospitalizations that is homoungus in relation to flu.

Thomas Sankara

The Massachusetts lady feels uncomfortable because hyper-mobile New Yorkers (like yourself Mark) are importing the disease all over the eastern seaboard right now. It’s pretty offensive to make her out to be provincial when people fleeing the city are burdening her local (and really weak) health systems.

Mark Ames

She is provincial—she's from the provinces. As for elitist city slicker-me—we have no car of our own, no safe home, and I'm with a 6 month old baby and a 4 year old boy, and nowhere to live come 6 days from now. The least of my problems is finding the most sensitive modifiers to describe provincial locals, and my guess is it's the least of her problems too. As you rightly point out the health system here is a disaster. This county is already getting hit hard and it's predicted to get hit a lot harder, and the locals here are not practicing social distance from everything we've seen over the last week.

Factory Troll

Hehe, yeah, if you were ruled by Denmark for over 400 year, then you better come up with a pretty good excuse. The bubonic plague was particularly bad news for the Norwegian nobility, who basically lost most of their revenue after 1349. Norway didn’t have the same traditions of feudalism, like the rest of Europe at the time, so it became very difficult for anyone to collect taxes or maintain something like a centralized state. Not to mention the fact that Norway is rather topographically challenged, let’s say. As the plague would continue to come in waves for the remainder of the 14th century, the nobility never really recovered, and Norway eventually became absorbed by Denmark in the 1380s. Something along the lines of; “You don’t have an heir to the throne? All right, then we’ll take over here. Any objections? I didn’t think so.” That said, the royal lineages on Norway, Sweden and Denmark are a real entangled, intermarried mess, so it isn’t necessarily clear who rules who and to what degree. But basically, Norway is in no position to assert it’s independence from the late 14th century onwards. The real low point in Norwegian history came at the reformation, when the Norwegian clergy opposed the reform-happy Danish king and got quashed, by military force this time. In the aftermath, the crown confiscated all the properties of the church and everyone else it deemed fit and brought the booty back to Copenhagen. Danish also became the official language and Denmark got to hold a monopoly on institutions of higher education, which would later become major points of contention for Norwegian nationalists and the reason why Norway today has two official written languages despite having only one official language. In any rate, this is not a part of history which anyone seem particularly interested in. The way I remember it being told in school is; “there was the Viking age, there was the Kingdom of Norway, but then came the black death, and that was the end of that. Now, turn your pages to the 19th century”. I didn't know about the band though, it wasn't part of the curriculum. Also, and I hate to be a pedant here (just kidding), but only about 1 in 10,000 Chinese were infected and the vast majority of them were swiftly put under quarantine in Wuhan, so I gather the chance of catching Coronavirus in Bangkok was very low.

online Leftist Archive Project (LARP)

I've been thinking about this more lately, since I myself live in rural NJ. I think maybe this is the logic of our system now - people from different regions of the country turning against each other, rather than us all coming together to solve this problem. I myself have been guilty of this. I think people from different regions are at each others' throats because it feels like nobody at the top is looking out for us.

A R

Lads, can you recall mentioning (possibly the Millennium War Games) that a US general showed the utter vulnerability of all the expensive naval toys? What was his name or which episode?

radiowarnerd

EP #142 on Iran-US war scenarios is one of 'em.

A R

Thanks for the prompt reply - USMC Lt Gen Paul Van Riper. I must be careful not to mix him up with USAF Brig Gen Jack D Ripper