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If you want to know fatality rates you need a controlled population. South Korea isn't that, its level of testing isn't even much higher than Switzerlands at th

If you want to know fatality rates you need a controlled population. South Korea isn't that, its level of testing isn't even much higher than Switzerlands at this point. There are only two known populations in which everyone was forced to be tested and their movement was limited, which thus makes up a controlled study: the Diamond Princess and the town of Vo in Italy. In both cases the fatality rate is much less than 1%. In fact in Vo it was zero. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/20/eradicated-coronavirus-mass-testing-covid-19-italy-vo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/20/eradic... 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... In prior pandemics like this one the final fatality rate ended up being much lower than the initial reports: like an order of magnitude lower. So we would expect to see the same this time. 0.1% or less is well within the bounds of possibility, as the essay by Ioannadis explains.

oivey 7y ago
The Diamond Princess’s population is also small, extremely poorly represents the general population, and happened in a setting unrepresentative of the rest of the world. Passenger age is just about the only factor that would drive the mortality and infection rates up, everything else lowers it. As a model the Diamond Princess should probably be treated more as the floor rather than anything representing the average.
- CountSessine 7y ago
  everything else lowers it What are these everything else’s? By far the best predictor of patient mortality has been age. What else is it about the Diamond Princess population that would come even close, even in sum, to the predictive power of their age?
  - oivey 7y ago
    Quality of care after the fact is the obvious one. The patients of the cruise ship weren’t being treated by a flooded hospital system. Quarantine on the ship is less than perfect, but it’s still better than the efforts made by many governments which was to do nothing until things got out of hand.
dwild 7y ago
> In fact in Vo it was zero. Isn't it a bit disingenuous to use a city with 89 cases as being statistically significant?
- thu2111 7y ago
  Vo has 3000 inhabitants, it's not a city, that's why they could completely isolate it and test every single inhabitant. It gives a 'random' sample, unlike other testing regimens. The population size isn't that big indeed, but it's still multiple times larger than the cruise ship.
  - pandaman 7y ago
    >The population size isn't that big indeed, but it's still multiple times larger than the cruise ship. Which cruise ship? Diamond Princess had ~3600 occupants (passengers and crew).
  - dwild 7y ago
    > Vo has 3000 inhabitants, How can you consider the fatality rate over an uninfected population? A year ago 8 billion peoples were not infected and 0 died! I have no idea why we worry. /s What's matter for the fatality rate is the 89 persons infected, which isn't statistically significant.

oivey 7y ago

The Diamond Princess’s population is also small, extremely poorly represents the general population, and happened in a setting unrepresentative of the rest of the world. Passenger age is just about the only factor that would drive the mortality and infection rates up, everything else lowers it. As a model the Diamond Princess should probably be treated more as the floor rather than anything representing the average.

CountSessine 7y ago
everything else lowers it What are these everything else’s? By far the best predictor of patient mortality has been age. What else is it about the Diamond Princess population that would come even close, even in sum, to the predictive power of their age?
- oivey 7y ago
  Quality of care after the fact is the obvious one. The patients of the cruise ship weren’t being treated by a flooded hospital system. Quarantine on the ship is less than perfect, but it’s still better than the efforts made by many governments which was to do nothing until things got out of hand.

dwild 7y ago

> In fact in Vo it was zero. Isn't it a bit disingenuous to use a city with 89 cases as being statistically significant?

thu2111 7y ago
Vo has 3000 inhabitants, it's not a city, that's why they could completely isolate it and test every single inhabitant. It gives a 'random' sample, unlike other testing regimens. The population size isn't that big indeed, but it's still multiple times larger than the cruise ship.
- pandaman 7y ago
  >The population size isn't that big indeed, but it's still multiple times larger than the cruise ship. Which cruise ship? Diamond Princess had ~3600 occupants (passengers and crew).
- dwild 7y ago
  > Vo has 3000 inhabitants, How can you consider the fatality rate over an uninfected population? A year ago 8 billion peoples were not infected and 0 died! I have no idea why we worry. /s What's matter for the fatality rate is the 89 persons infected, which isn't statistically significant.