5 ms·

The death rate of 0.5% falls right in the range of what modelers have been using, by the way. Not exactly very positive news.

by arrrg 7y ago

nikolay 7y ago
Yeah, still 150,000 death toll if everybody gets infected. And this is not considering the permanent lung and other tissue damage that's getting reported from "recovered" patients.
- hcknwscommenter 7y ago
  You are one order of magnitude too low at 150,000. It's much worse than that.
  - nikolay 7y ago
    Yes, you're right.
newacct583 7y ago
Right. Really this study is just confirming (with higher error bars than we'd like) what we already strongly suspected. Note that as others are pointing out, that 0.5% isn't really extrapolated correctly. The tested case deaths are looking like they're only 70% of the total or so. Also using a current death count with contemporary infection counts is a mismatch, because it forgets that ~35% of the people currently in the hospital won't ever leave, which is about 5k more deaths. So a better calibrated CFR might be 1% or so, which is even closer to the range we've all been assuming.
- usaar333 7y ago
  Except this data is also lagging by three weeks, depending on what antibodies are being checked. Some deaths today have come from infections in April, so the net effect could be a wash. And where are you getting a 35% death rate for "ever hospitalized"? It's realistically somewhere around 15%-20%, though with major age skew. (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...)
  - newacct583 7y ago
    Per https://covidtracking.com/data#state-ny https://covidtracking.com/data#state-ny there have been 57103 hospitalizations in the state (not city, so not quite the same population), of which 15021 are still hospitalized. So that's 42082 cases that have left the hospital, of which 15740 died, or 37%. Obviously there's some apples/oranges here, both due to the population being different from the city and the fact that some of those deaths were outside of hospitals. But it's close. It's been covered in the past that NYC's total fatality rate has been good but its ICU survival rate has been anomalously bad.
    - usaar333 6y ago
      Perhaps a lot of those deaths were outside hospitals (nursing homes, etc.)? Here's a report for all hospitalizations in NYC from March 1 to April 4: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184 21% of patients who discharged or died died.
- cozzyd 7y ago
  IFR, not CFR
hcknwscommenter 7y ago
It is very positive in that we can be more confident that our assumptions are close to reality. 0.5%*330M still equals 1.65M deaths, or (very roughly) 5M ICU beds. Spread out over 52 weeks, that's a lot of ventilators and ICU beds and PPE, but it is a target. A very big juicy target that we can and should aim directly at, and HIT.
- nateberkopec 7y ago
  It's more or less epidemiologically impossible that you will see an attack rate of 100% (as you just assumed). Once attack rate reaches >40~60%, the reproduction number drops below 1 because there just aren't enough uninfected hosts.
  - Uhhrrr 7y ago
    It will probably be significantly higher than 60%, since COVID-19's R0 without lockdown seems to be pretty high. The CDC has estimated it at 5.7 [0]. Herd immunity threshold = 1 - 1/R0, so the threshold would be 82.4%. [0] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article?deliveryName=USCDC_333-DM25287 https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article?deliv...
    - GhostVII 7y ago
      That R0 assumes we are taking essentially no measures to stop the virus though, right? I don't no much about it but it seems like the R0 would drop significantly if we keep doing social distancing, expand testing, make people wear masks, etc.
      - Uhhrrr 7y ago
        It does, but the point of getting to herd immunity is that we don't want to do any of that other stuff.
      - s1artibartfast 7y ago
        The 5.7 number comes from wuhan, during lunar new year, and before viral identification.

The death rate of 0.5% falls right in the range of what modelers have been using, by the way. Not exactly very positive news.

by arrrg 7y ago

The death rate of 0.5% falls right in the range of what modelers have been using, by the way. Not exactly very positive news.

nikolay 7y ago

Yeah, still 150,000 death toll if everybody gets infected. And this is not considering the permanent lung and other tissue damage that's getting reported from "recovered" patients.

hcknwscommenter 7y ago
You are one order of magnitude too low at 150,000. It's much worse than that.
- nikolay 7y ago
  Yes, you're right.

newacct583 7y ago

Right. Really this study is just confirming (with higher error bars than we'd like) what we already strongly suspected. Note that as others are pointing out, that 0.5% isn't really extrapolated correctly. The tested case deaths are looking like they're only 70% of the total or so. Also using a current death count with contemporary infection counts is a mismatch, because it forgets that ~35% of the people currently in the hospital won't ever leave, which is about 5k more deaths. So a better calibrated CFR might be 1% or so, which is even closer to the range we've all been assuming.

usaar333 7y ago
Except this data is also lagging by three weeks, depending on what antibodies are being checked. Some deaths today have come from infections in April, so the net effect could be a wash. And where are you getting a 35% death rate for "ever hospitalized"? It's realistically somewhere around 15%-20%, though with major age skew. (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...)
- newacct583 7y ago
  Per https://covidtracking.com/data#state-ny https://covidtracking.com/data#state-ny there have been 57103 hospitalizations in the state (not city, so not quite the same population), of which 15021 are still hospitalized. So that's 42082 cases that have left the hospital, of which 15740 died, or 37%. Obviously there's some apples/oranges here, both due to the population being different from the city and the fact that some of those deaths were outside of hospitals. But it's close. It's been covered in the past that NYC's total fatality rate has been good but its ICU survival rate has been anomalously bad.
  - usaar333 6y ago
    Perhaps a lot of those deaths were outside hospitals (nursing homes, etc.)? Here's a report for all hospitalizations in NYC from March 1 to April 4: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184 21% of patients who discharged or died died.
cozzyd 7y ago
IFR, not CFR

hcknwscommenter 7y ago

It is very positive in that we can be more confident that our assumptions are close to reality. 0.5%*330M still equals 1.65M deaths, or (very roughly) 5M ICU beds. Spread out over 52 weeks, that's a lot of ventilators and ICU beds and PPE, but it is a target. A very big juicy target that we can and should aim directly at, and HIT.

nateberkopec 7y ago
It's more or less epidemiologically impossible that you will see an attack rate of 100% (as you just assumed). Once attack rate reaches >40~60%, the reproduction number drops below 1 because there just aren't enough uninfected hosts.
- Uhhrrr 7y ago
  It will probably be significantly higher than 60%, since COVID-19's R0 without lockdown seems to be pretty high. The CDC has estimated it at 5.7 [0]. Herd immunity threshold = 1 - 1/R0, so the threshold would be 82.4%. [0] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article?deliveryName=USCDC_333-DM25287 https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article?deliv...
  - GhostVII 7y ago
    That R0 assumes we are taking essentially no measures to stop the virus though, right? I don't no much about it but it seems like the R0 would drop significantly if we keep doing social distancing, expand testing, make people wear masks, etc.
    - Uhhrrr 7y ago
      It does, but the point of getting to herd immunity is that we don't want to do any of that other stuff.
    - s1artibartfast 7y ago
      The 5.7 number comes from wuhan, during lunar new year, and before viral identification.