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So a 0.5% fatality rate sounds like "only" five times the rate of the flu. EXCEPT that I would bet that if you thoroughly traced all the asymptomatic but positi
by joe_the_user 7y ago
So a 0.5% fatality rate sounds like "only" five times the rate of the flu. EXCEPT that I would bet that if you thoroughly traced all the asymptomatic but positive for the flu, it's fatality rate would decline also and it still causes significant deaths.
Total Covid deaths are already at a "mild flu season" level already after a month and continuing some level of exponential growth after social distancing.
It's sad and awful but it seems like with the current administration approach, the response of ramped up contract tracing has pretty much flown away and with these figures, we're looking 500K deaths, 250K over the next two month and another 250K over a longer period. Hide your parents...
- irq11 7y agoExcept that a huge portion of those deaths are in places that may have already reached herd immunity, if the ratio of comfirmed / actual cases is as small as this study suggests. NYC, for example, has 123k confirmed cases. Multiply by 50, and you have 6.1M, which is close to 70% of the total population.
- JamesBarney 7y agoWhere are you getting the assumption that only 1 in 50 infected are confirmed? That seems like an especially low confirmed case to infection ratio.
- irq11 7y agoDirectly from the article. It’s the lower-bound estimate for confirmed to infected found by the study. You should read it before commenting.
- wk_end 7y agoI’m not a virologist or epidemiologist, so I might be off-base here, but: the flu’s really well understood isn’t it? Medicine’s been studying it basically forever. I’d be really surprised if our fatality rate for it wasn’t pretty accurate and didn’t already have asymptomatic cases factored in.