Hospitals in an epidemic are major spreaders of the infection. If false positive results lead to patients being put together with real carriers, they will soon be infected.
From a recent report[1] from Italy:
> For example, we are learning that hospitals might be the main Covid-19 carriers, as they are rapidly populated by infected patients, facilitating transmission to uninfected patients. Patients are transported by our regional system, which also contributes to spreading the disease as its ambulances and personnel rapidly become vectors. Health workers are asymptomatic carriers or sick without surveillance; some might die, including young people, which increases the stress of those on the front line.
It could mean that some of the major causes of the large death toll in Italy are the lack of personal protection equipment, and, possibly, laxity in following protocol.
> some of the major causes of the large death toll...
Wrong. The major cause is that the number of people getting sick at once was much higher than the infrastructure can handle. That's what other governments saw and now try to avoid with the lockdowns.
This was made 10 days ago by the Italian biotech Association it's the number of new cases and deaths per week (red), compared with the number of cases per week at the peak of the "normal" flu (blue):
It can happen everywhere if the growth continues, simply because nothing can cope with fast exponential growth. At the moment, wherever it is uncontrolled, it's around 3 days to double. Sounds like small numbers, just 2 and 3? That gives however a thousandfold growth in 30 days: everybody working with computers should be very familiar with the equation 2^10 = 1024 (it's 2^(30/3) == 2^10 == 1024, 30 being the number of days for the projection, 3 the doubling time and 2 the doubling itself).
Nobody has thousandfold more hospital beds and doctors ready, even less a million times more, which is the two month's growth.
Discussing other factors without first admitting the major one is obviously biased.
> there just aren't enough people to sustain two months' growth
It can be simply calculated: it is expected that without measures the growth to 70% of population would be continuous (very approximately, the end phase wouldn't, we're estimating the limit). So the target is 6e9 people. If we assume that 4/5ths are the people who remain undetected by our current sampling, we want to know the growth between the current known infected and the target which is then 1.26e9 people. Currently known are 0.5 million infected. So the fastest end of growth phase would be just: 2520 times or around 2^11=2048 == just 11 times 3 day doubling time, or 33 days.
The growth will surely not be always exactly 3 days however, so it will be slower, but still not less dramatic, because the resources are many, many times smaller, in the poorer countries many tens of times smaller.
In short it can be very, very bad, and that will be much longer than just a month, just not the exact growth as now.
See the papers from Imperial College London for the exact shapes of the curves and the examples of their speed and growth.
That may be highly specific to this period, where italy outside hospitals is in lockdown. As we move forward, people will use the tests to decide whether to go back to work, which makes them more critical
Hospitals in an epidemic are major spreaders of the infection. If false positive results lead to patients being put together with real carriers, they will soon be infected.
From a recent report[1] from Italy:
> For example, we are learning that hospitals might be the main Covid-19 carriers, as they are rapidly populated by infected patients, facilitating transmission to uninfected patients. Patients are transported by our regional system, which also contributes to spreading the disease as its ambulances and personnel rapidly become vectors. Health workers are asymptomatic carriers or sick without surveillance; some might die, including young people, which increases the stress of those on the front line.
It could mean that some of the major causes of the large death toll in Italy are the lack of personal protection equipment, and, possibly, laxity in following protocol.
[1] https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.20.0080