6 ms·

SARS doesn't even come close to the infectiousness of COVID-19. China only registered like 8k patients by the end of it, even you times that by 10, that still d

SARS doesn't even come close to the infectiousness of COVID-19. China only registered like 8k patients by the end of it, even you times that by 10, that still dwarfed by the COVID-19 on global scale, and it is only the beginning. The reason COVID-19 get singled out might not be the mortality rate alone (it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary), but more on its impact on paralyzing our health care system with a swarm of people requires hospitalization. And it achieves all this in record time. I don't agree this is a perception problem, the threat is real. Social media can panic, but you can't really tell people it is OK when patients are lying/dying on the floor of hospitals.

MiroF 7y ago
I'm confused as to what this comment is replying to - the GP never made any comparison between SARS and COVID-19. I suspect that you might have confused SARSCov2 for SARS?
- p1necone 7y ago
  I imagine most of the people reading it made that mistake. I've only ever seen it referred to as COVID-19 or Coronavirus. I assumed SARSCov2 was a more specific name for the virus involved in the early 2000s SARS outbreak.
  - frenchyatwork 7y ago
    SARS-CoV2 is the name of the virus for the 2019 Coronavirus. The previous one was just SARS-CoV.
nostromo 7y ago
> it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary Please stop dividing deaths by confirmed cases and reporting that as mortality rate. The number of confirmed cases is much, much larger than actual cases, in particular in outbreak zones where testing is very limited.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Suspected cases
- rurp 7y ago
  I've been using this[0] page as a reference, which seems to back up those numbers. It currently shows 82,424 recoveries and 8,697 deaths. Can you recommend a better resource I should be looking at? [0]https://nssac.bii.virginia.edu/covid-19/dashboard/ https://nssac.bii.virginia.edu/covid-19/dashboard/
  - jpxw 7y ago
    It’s not this simple. It takes a longer time for people to recover than it does for people to die. Particularly when you consider that people stop having symptoms, so “recover” in the ordinary sense of the word, but still test positive for the virus, so are not marked as recovered.
  - endless1234 7y ago
    That would only list those recoveries that have been bad enough to warrant a test in the first place. With health care systems being overwhelmed the world over, almost no country is doing extensive testing of all people who suspect they might have been infected, meaning there will be a huge number of mild cases going unreported. South Korea is perhaps the only exception.
  - Misdicorl 7y ago
    Look at the mortality specifically in places which overtest: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. There it looks closer to 1%. There are additional factors to consider like population age, but there Italy is the outlier, not South Korea.
- bosswipe 7y ago
  South Korea has done the most extensive testing of any country and there death rate is running around 5%. But here we are playing "I’m not an epidemiologist but".
Veen 7y ago
It's worth remembering that the "fatality rate" you're quoting accounts only for people who have been tested and then died. We have no idea what the denominator in an accurate fatality rate calculation would be. Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded.
- kerng 7y ago
  Imperial college says it's about 0.8% with the data available at this point.
  - Veen 7y ago
    Yeah, heavily skewed towards people 70 and up.
    - viklove 7y ago
      Fuck those people right?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - thu2111 7y ago
        Nobody is saying that. The data gets harder to interpret for older people because they're very frequently weak and about to die of something. Some part of why stats seem to vary between countries may be due to differences in recorded deaths, which can be somewhat arbitrary when there are multiple conditions. Sort of like how a lot of HIV+ people die of pneumonia but was the cause of death that or the underlying condition of HIV? John Ionnadis has been writing about this: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... He's a medic, epidemiologist and author of "Why most published research results are wrong", probably one of the most influential papers of the last 20 years across all of science. He says: even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter. These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. The whole essay is worth a read. It has more to say about questionable use of data and analysis than SARS-CoV-2 itself but is worth reading regardless.

MiroF 7y ago

I'm confused as to what this comment is replying to - the GP never made any comparison between SARS and COVID-19. I suspect that you might have confused SARSCov2 for SARS?

p1necone 7y ago
I imagine most of the people reading it made that mistake. I've only ever seen it referred to as COVID-19 or Coronavirus. I assumed SARSCov2 was a more specific name for the virus involved in the early 2000s SARS outbreak.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago
  SARS-CoV2 is the name of the virus for the 2019 Coronavirus. The previous one was just SARS-CoV.

nostromo 7y ago

> it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary Please stop dividing deaths by confirmed cases and reporting that as mortality rate. The number of confirmed cases is much, much larger than actual cases, in particular in outbreak zones where testing is very limited.

selimthegrim 7y ago
Suspected cases
rurp 7y ago
I've been using this[0] page as a reference, which seems to back up those numbers. It currently shows 82,424 recoveries and 8,697 deaths. Can you recommend a better resource I should be looking at? [0]https://nssac.bii.virginia.edu/covid-19/dashboard/ https://nssac.bii.virginia.edu/covid-19/dashboard/
- jpxw 7y ago
  It’s not this simple. It takes a longer time for people to recover than it does for people to die. Particularly when you consider that people stop having symptoms, so “recover” in the ordinary sense of the word, but still test positive for the virus, so are not marked as recovered.
- endless1234 7y ago
  That would only list those recoveries that have been bad enough to warrant a test in the first place. With health care systems being overwhelmed the world over, almost no country is doing extensive testing of all people who suspect they might have been infected, meaning there will be a huge number of mild cases going unreported. South Korea is perhaps the only exception.
- Misdicorl 7y ago
  Look at the mortality specifically in places which overtest: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. There it looks closer to 1%. There are additional factors to consider like population age, but there Italy is the outlier, not South Korea.
bosswipe 7y ago
South Korea has done the most extensive testing of any country and there death rate is running around 5%. But here we are playing "I’m not an epidemiologist but".

Veen 7y ago

It's worth remembering that the "fatality rate" you're quoting accounts only for people who have been tested and then died. We have no idea what the denominator in an accurate fatality rate calculation would be. Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded.

kerng 7y ago
Imperial college says it's about 0.8% with the data available at this point.
- Veen 7y ago
  Yeah, heavily skewed towards people 70 and up.
  - viklove 7y ago
    Fuck those people right?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - thu2111 7y ago
      Nobody is saying that. The data gets harder to interpret for older people because they're very frequently weak and about to die of something. Some part of why stats seem to vary between countries may be due to differences in recorded deaths, which can be somewhat arbitrary when there are multiple conditions. Sort of like how a lot of HIV+ people die of pneumonia but was the cause of death that or the underlying condition of HIV? John Ionnadis has been writing about this: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... He's a medic, epidemiologist and author of "Why most published research results are wrong", probably one of the most influential papers of the last 20 years across all of science. He says: even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter. These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. The whole essay is worth a read. It has more to say about questionable use of data and analysis than SARS-CoV-2 itself but is worth reading regardless.