2 ms·
I did some back-of-the-envelope maths on this topic using South Korea stats, Diamond Princess stats, and the CDC Influenza and All-cause-pneumonia death dashboa
by vanniv 7y ago
I did some back-of-the-envelope maths on this topic using South Korea stats, Diamond Princess stats, and the CDC Influenza and All-cause-pneumonia death dashboard.
Assuming that South Korea catches most of their cases and Diamond Princess caught all of them, and assuming also that those two populations are of the same basic age-and-health distribution as rest-of-world, and assuming that the virus is roughly equally deadly everywhere.
Further assuming that all deaths caused by COVID are deaths involving pneumonia, and that all deaths of elderly, I'll people whose proximate cause of death was pneumonia or pneumonia as a complication of their other illness, and yet further assuming that none of those deaths would be recorded as death by cardiovascular disease or chronic respiratory disease (as those two causes of death are in the top 5, and could hide the entire population having COVID)
All of those assumptions led me to an upper bound for undetected COVID cases as of March 1st of 350,000-400,000 cases. (That is how many cases would have produced a death rate that could have hidden in the moderate spike of influenza and pneumonia deaths from Jan 15th to Feb 15th)
My assumptions are massive, and have wide error bars in both directions, but each assumption either seems entirely defensible or else was mandatory to get an upper bound other than "everyone, plus or minus everyone"
- mNovak 7y agoYes, it seems deaths are the most reliable indicator we have (though even this is limited [0]). Looking at highly sampled cases (SK and Diamond Princess) seems to indicate a net fatality rate of 1%. Thinking about the cohort of infections eventually leading to those deaths, though, means we're really getting a snapshot of the number of infections some 19 days ago (5 days incubation, 14 days from symptom to death [1]). With a conservative 6 day doubling period, and assuming still in growth phase, cumulative infections today is roughly 900x cumulative deaths today. So ballpark for the US (217 deaths) is about 195k current infections. Spain (831 deaths): 748k infections Italy (3405 deaths): 3M infections [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-homes-insigh/uncounted-among-coronavirus-victims-deaths-sweep-through-italys-nursing-homes-idUSKBN2152V0 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/#days https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...
- vanniv 7y agoYour source is yet another avenue for deaths to occur without being counted. My flu and pneumonia data came from https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html Check out the disclaimer on that page, too (even routine things like flu and pneumonia, that happen every year, the statistics are really bad until a few years later when all the adjustments are made) One interview I saw from a CDC modeller last week was using 5-day doubling, 15-day median time to death, and 1% CFR to estimate, and was saying thus that current cases ~= 800x current deaths. So, yeah, it's clearly more widespread than reported, and clearly all numbers everywhere are totally wrong (including yours and mine)