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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
by 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 agoImperial college says it's about 0.8% with the data available at this point.
- Veen 7y agoYeah, heavily skewed towards people 70 and up.
- viklove 7y agoFuck those people right?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thu2111 7y agoNobody 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.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWhat really matters is how fast will the serious (but perhaps not fatal if treated) cases completely DDoS your healthcare. After that point, the mortality rises for both the illness and everything else that's more serious than that illness.
- joe_the_user 7y agoThis. 20% of cases require hospitalization. Once the hospitals are taken out, the fatality rate skyrockets and we're in the nightmare phrase - 400+ people died in Italy, today.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoOn top of that - and I think this isn't seriously reported on just yet - you start bleeding doctors and nurses, especially as nobody in the West has enough PPEs to keep them safe. There are only so many of them to go around.
- yread 7y agoIndeed, yesterday, more people in Lombardy died of COVID19 than on an average day from all causes combined. And they are on a lockdown for 11 days already
- thu2111 7y agoNo. Nobody knows how what the actual proportion of cases require hospitalisation. That's the point being made in this entire thread. It's clearly very hard to let go of what looks like data and say "actually, we don't know". That's a driving cause of current events. There's a lot of analysis out there right now quoting things we "know" about SARS-CoV-2 and when you dig in, it's not real knowledge, it's a garbled or misused statistic. We have lots of epidemiology but not enough epistemology.
- joe_the_user 7y agoSouth Korea does exhaustive and they get a fatality rate of 1%. WHO gives 1% max + 20% needing hospitalization. The various cruise ships also give a good idea. At the start, the "Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded" claim had plausibility. Now it needs to die in fire. This stuff has demonstrated it's qualities at scale and we need to get with it.
- tanilama 7y agoAlso noted, SK's infected populations are overwhelmingly skew towards young population during their 20s from the cult cluster. This won't be the case for other countries. 1% is way too optimistic at this point.
- nostromo 7y agoThe Princess Cruise has nearly perfect data as everyone in a controlled population was tested. (This is not true for South Korea, which has tested less than half a percent of their population.) The fatality rate was 0.8%. The majority of their passengers were over 60 years old, so even this number is too high compared to the global population.
- joe_the_user 7y agoYes, the Princess Cruise tells 0.8% might be the best case fatality rate with a functioning medical system. Even that would be catastrophic for if the virus infects a large percentage of the population, as it is rapidly moving to do. Thus we cannot be even in the least bit sanguine on this and need to move with speed against it. This is in no way comparable to 2009 or other recent events (contrary to your ggp).
- nostromo 7y agoAs I mentioned, the cruise ship was full of old people, so no, it's not the best case scenario. It's likely the worst case scenario.
- m_ke 7y agoThe nursing home in Washington is a good isolated case that shows how deadly it is for older people. It has had 26 deaths so far and 50 people who tested positive https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-deaths-washington-nursing-home-outbreak-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-deaths-washingto...
- beaunative 7y agoFor a highly-contagious disease like this, we can safely assume the number are somewhat accurate as long as tests are being performed. Why? If we missed one case, they will continue to infect more people, as such, becoming much more noticeable. We can safely say fatality rate data from China would be an accurate overall estimation where its spread is contained.