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All the people I've ever seen calling the 3.4% figure "flawed science" only seem to ever attack it for being too high. There's very rarely ever voices from the
by shalmanese 7y ago
All the people I've ever seen calling the 3.4% figure "flawed science" only seem to ever attack it for being too high. There's very rarely ever voices from the other direction of calling it too low.
People underestimate how many cases Hubei actually managed to treat. They built two purpose built hospitals where every bed was an ICU and converted stadiums and hotels to centralized quarantine facilities so the less acute cases could be near but not in hospitals but could be rapidly shuttled there if the symptoms got worse. They flew in over 40K+ medical workers from all over China to treat less than 80K cases, 80% of which were "mild" which means 2.5 medical workers per non-mild case.
What we really need is the cohort from China who had hospitalizatable symptoms and were denied any sort of treatment, what the range of outcomes in those cases? Even then, it's not a natural experiment because China is practicing triage, same as Italy, and so we need to compare like to like as much as possible.
If the models are correct at assuming that our hospitals are going to get more than 10X overwhelmed, then this is the real number that matters. What's the rate of death for people who have 0 medical intervention.
The reason why is, if the healthcare system isn't overwhelmed, then the CFR is not an important number because the total number of deaths is small enough that variances in that range are trivia. If the healthcare system is overwhelmed, then any data we get from non-overwhelmed systems, which is all people appear to be using, is utterly bollocks.
If people are suggesting that 70% of people in their country could be infected in a year, then we should be using a CFR closer to 10 - 15% as the true number and that means we could be imagining a world where 7 - 10% of all people are dead by this time next year.
- jMyles 7y agoOh heck yeah, the CFR can be closer if there isn't capacity to help people who can be saved by intervention. But the specific flaw in the 3.4% number is that the denominator was calculated without any real basis for believing that the number of confirmed cases was close to the number of cases (or that it was similarly close in various regions). That's the part I want to see revisited, and which is of course the topic of a great deal of discourse over the past 48 hours or so. It's already been linked elsewhere in the thread, but here's one of the widely-circulated commentaries calling the 3.4% CFR into question (in fact making the case that it's meaningless): 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/?fbclid=IwAR2UQ9aTjEOZxtd8HgRqvaFdBNb-Zj-2e46YxK1bxgM94eYI6N9LxTKsTNc https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...