In other news: I went with the reject option 
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How could you betray the original task? Bad ai
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Going back to original topic:
"In the town of Coccaglio, an hour’s drive east of here, the local nursing home lost over a third of its residents in March. None of the 24 people who died there were tested for the new coronavirus. Nor were the 38 people who died in another nursing home in the nearby town of Lodi.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Italy’s official death toll from the virus stands at 13,155, the most of any country in the world. But that number tells only part of the story because many people who die from the virus don’t make it to the hospital."
"Nowhere in Italy has been harder hit than Bergamo, a city of about 120,000 people. In March 2019, 125 people died in the city. This March, 553 people died. Of these, 201 deaths were officially attributed to the virus. This leaves 352 further deaths for the period, far higher than normal.
In the wider Bergamo province, which comprises the city and more than 240 small towns and has a total population of 1.1 million, 2,060 people died in March from the virus. But some 4,500 more people died in the province in March than a year earlier"
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You paint a scary picture, and maybe rightly so, but there might be more to the story.
More than 12,400 people have died with the coronavirus since the pandemic started gutting this country last month, making Italy’s mortality rate around 10.2 percent in comparison with 4.2 percent or less elsewhere
People have tried to justify the deaths by pointing to Italy’s large elderly population. But the real explanation for Italy’s staggering mortality rate is more complicated than that. Massimo Galli, who heads the infectious disease unit at Sacco Hospital in Milan, says it is because Italy’s more than 105,000 cases of coronavirus infection merely scratch the surface. The real figure, he says, is “much, much more,”. Italy’s Civil Protection Department agrees and says the total number of cases is likely 600,000 or more.
Another reason Italy’s mortality rate seems so high could come down to how Italians count their dead. The scientific adviser to Italy’s health minister said last week that Italy counts anyone who died with the coronavirus as a COVID-19 death. “Only 12 percent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus,” he said, meaning their true cause of death was a result of their underlying condition and pneumonia caused by the virus simply sent them over the edge.
So it might be that a big chunk of the casualties that you quote are people who were going to die in the coming months. We will have to wait to find out. Having the total number of infected people 6-10x higher than diagnosed also works in our favor.
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You can be 70and have high blood pressure and live for another 10-20 years.
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Yeah, I thought about that too. That’s why it will be interesting to verify all these assumptions. I just like not to think all negative.
Yes, true. But most people who die are even older than that.
Median age of the deceased is 82 at the moment.
(https://www.bag.admin.ch/dam/bag/de/dokumente/mt/k-und-i/aktuelle-ausbrueche-pandemien/2019-nCoV/covid-19-lagebericht.pdf.download.pdf/COVID-19_Epidemiologische_Lage_Schweiz.pdf)
With age 82, you have a baseline life expectancy of around 6-8 years.
Considering that the death rate for the infected over 80 is between 15-20%, the people dying from it are probably in significantly worse health than those who survive.
The “coming months” part of @Bojack comment might thus only be slightly hyperbolic.
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I beat the game twice, but I still can’t see how you managed to finish with just 1000 probe launched.
No one will ever have the best number (even ef a president would love to use that word…). It’s also not that important probably. The high numbers in Italy are useful to scare people and make them stay at home or stay safe. Higher number won’t change it that much probably. If you need the numbers to understand how much the virus is letal then you have problems. I believe you can’t use the numbers or you have to make huge guesses or just work locally.
The most important number for us should be the bed rates in ICU and how fast they free up.
Self replication attribute is the most important in the last phase of the game. If you boost it enough you can finish the game with less than 1000 probes launched…
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From the beginning of the pandemia I had the feeling that your genetics plays a role in how sick you get. The reason for this assumption was the large difference between death toll numbers (maybe tricked) in China and numbers in Italy. Now large research projects are trying to validate this hypothesis.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/how-sick-will-coronavirus-make-you-answer-may-be-your-genes#
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This is big
The number of Americans applying for initial unemployment benefits surged to a new record 6.65 million last week, the U.S. Labor Department said on Thursday, as the full impact of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic on the labor market became apparent.
The increase dwarfed the prior week’s figure of 3.28 million and eclipsed the previous record of 695,000 set in 1982.
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I just read an interesting post, which comments on a study that says that the the difference in coronavirus infection rates between countries may be explained by tuberculosis vaccinations. In countries like Italy, Switzerland, USA the vaccination is not mandatory, in Poland, Japan it is.
Here an interesting map of Germany. In DDR they did vaccinate and the number of infected is much lower.
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No worries about the 6.6M unemployed. Markets are up. Will we get 12M next week?
Sure, more room for QE, helicopter money and other gifts from the Fed. Money rain! Good for stocks!
what I don’t get is why the USD is also up?
Please post the link to the article, it’s an interesting correlation. Another one is that the ex-DDR part of Germany is less densely populated. In Italy they have been talking about correlations with the pollution in the air, a serious problem in the north of the country: maybe particles in the air can help the virus spread. Then I saw a study showing that flu-vaccine increased chances of getting infected by coronaviruses (not this one). Plenty of directions for researchers to look into.
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Damn you that posted this game: Universal Paperclips achieved in 6 hours 39 minutes 2 seconds
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That was priced yesterday.
The facebook post is in Polish, but I googled it and news portals already report on it: