I wish there was an assessment with error bars not spanning multiple orders of magnitude...
Jokes aside. If the number was true, for Italy (33k reported deaths) this would give around 12M infected. For US (99k reported deaths) around 36M infected. Those numbers seem to be unrealistic. I remember Italy did some tests and even in the worst hit places less than 7% of population developed antibodies, not average 25% for entire Italy as suggested.
I know this is very, very back of envelop calculation but it would be nice to somehow reconcile those numbers.
Italy is one of the 7 outlier countries. It has an IFR even above 1%. But Italy is always the highest flu outlier worldwide (regularily above 1%), so there no reason to bring Italy into the discussion.
The other outliers are much more interesting, like Belgium, which has also a reporting problem. UK, NL, Spain,...
0.3% has been the established number for a few months already. Reporting always concentrated on the meaningless CFR at 3.4%, for political reasons. 10x more asymptotic cases also reflect all the antibody tests. Asymptotic means an ordinary cold.
That's why it's so dangerous. Low fatality rate, no symptoms, high reproduction.
Sometimes, some situations are just not representative and we don't always know the reason.
For example, mortality might have been higher because of inadequate care at the highest of the pandemic. Or there might be some genes that are prevalent or absent in the population that are specific to the region that make the virus behave differently than for the rest of the world.
Indeed Spain is the most interesting outlier. One of the world's best health systems, but still an pretty high IFR, much higher than all its neighbors. Will need a few more weeks to explain that. Haven't even heard some ideas why. I'm more watching genetics, maybe their strand was very different.
Initially I thought of those numbers (36m in the US) as totally unrealistic. But then comparing to seasonal influenza case counts, they seem to be within that order of magnitude (39m-56m cases): https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
would that be implausible? am I misunderstanding or comparing the wrong metrics?
I'm actually curious to see the time interval of when the first true COVID-19 case appeared plotted over first true 2019-2020 influenza cases. If along the same timeline, you'd figure that social distancing would have affected the R0 of both.
Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 is truly more (or comparably) contagious, 36M could be plausible.
To be clear: I am not equivalating COVID-19 fatality rate w/ the flu, or suggesting it is "innocuous" as the flu is.
The death rate is one thing but the hospitalization rate should not be ignored. We've seen the overflowing capacity in New York and other places so we need to be careful with just quoting the death rate and feeling that it's no big deal. Whatever the death rate is we know that over 100k people have died. And who knows how many thousands of survivors have dealt and will deal with the damage the virus inflicts on their bodies. We should not take that lightly.
I'm one that thinks that face masks and keeping social distance is the best way to go. If we followed that without fail the transmission rate would collapse and we would be close to normal.
It's almost impossible to do both. You can't repurpose opticians as emergency techs in a short time. It doesn't work. Hospitals are built given certain make up and it's hard to change that in a short time.
This is the biggest thing people don't get - this is not the flu and surviving it or having mild symptoms does not mean that you didn't signed up a chornic CVD or metabolic disease based on the early data that the virus causes a permanent myocardic injury, lung scaring, and God knows what else. We'll be studying the damage for the decades to come! I think many people forget that even the "benign" HPV causes different types of cancer, and we recently found it. So, a new virus means being extra careful, but how can you explain this to people who strongly believe that Bill Gates wants to chip them thru vaccines and that 5G kills birds and people?
Many things are dangerous. Being careful means evaluating risks, not hysterically avoiding all risks at any cost.
Smoking costs more lives than COVID-19 and it is much easier to save these lives. Yet it’s acceptable to do very little. But somehow COVID-19 warrants endless lockdowns.
330M*.0026 = 857K. in US. Herd immunity is like 60% of that number. That's a lot of people. That could be your parent or grandparent or you.
I get so tired of people comparing this to the flu. It's over taken the number of deaths from the flu in 2 months not 12. And that's while we were in locked down.
Also, a whole lot of people get symptoms. I don't think having flu like symptoms for 2 weeks(not 2-3 days) sounds like fun either.
I had flu-like symptoms for 2-3 weeks in late Jan / early Feb, and you're right, it is not fun at all.
I've been thinking about getting the antibody test. Kind of hoping I've already had it. On the one hand would be nice to know that I "might" have some immunity going forward, but on the other very scary to think covid has been active in my community that long. The first official case in my state isn't until a month later.
Immunity means that the immune system won the battle and killed the virus, and develop tools to kill it so you won't get sick again. So, not impossible, but very unlikely. Maybe this virus can hide itself like HIV and burst out regularly to test the waters? Very unlikely but as I said, not absolutely completely and utterly impossible.
I don't think many people are still in the "same as flu" camp, which is a bit of a straw man. For example this CDC guidance is estimating 5-8x worse fatality rate than the average flu (0.05% IFR).
You can have a realistic opinion of the disease and reasonably object to lockdowns. I'm not sure if your issue is with opinions against the lockdown, this author, or some other random group not mentioned here. I do think overall everything about the disease has come in on the low side of expert estimates back from March (this article suggests otherwise). Which is both a testimate to science and damning of our society's tools for handling a disease in this range of severity.
More than 50% of Americans get the flu shot every year, we kind of have some immunity, and, yet, 20K to 60K people die every year, when only 10% get it (due to the flu shots or the immunity). Remove the immunity and flu shot preventing some infection, and even if it's as bad as the flu and doesn't have any permanent damage, which it seems to have, we're still talking hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.
In the United States a lot of people I know are eager to get back to work because they don’t want to get evicted or fall behind on car payments and fall into the Spiraling USA Debt Trap that ruins so many lives. I don’t blame them in the least.
I was laid off in March and have still not received any unemployment insurance myself. If that is still the case this time next month I will be freaking out all the same.
Yes. Though what’s disappointing to me here in the US, is that rather than understand these problems are consequences of our system and choices we’ve made, so many people are getting angry that they have to wear a mask. I wish that anger were at least directed somewhere useful that would help remediate the situation instead of so misplaced as to be directed at doing something that’ll actively make it worse.
I by no means complaining about a people that have to go back to work. It just sucks that people have to make a choice between potentially risking their's or their family's lives for a paycheck.
I just don't think people should be understating or under estimating this thing.
So the problem is the catastrophic dismantling of the welfare state over the past several decades.
Ironically, most Americans complaining about getting the economy up and running again also vote against having a basic safety net. I’d say you’re getting what you asked for. Should have at least voted for Medicare For All.
I have had 4 phone calls so far and I was approved on the first one but haven’t received any benefits. It takes between 1-2 weeks between each call for them to call me back. The last person I spoke with said my case is completely normal (?) and sure enough there are some people on reddit who have had a similar experience. There has been no explanation and no accountability short of these calls when they assure me everything is working out fine, and I assure them the opposite.
>According to new estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the COVID-19 infection fatality rate may be as low as 0.26%, a number that only doubles the seasonal flu but significantly lower than earlier estimates.
The news has been pushing worst case scenarios at every step of the way, not doing a good job of presenting the complexities behind the facts and estimates.
And lots of people seem to be blind to this. Maybe schools could be doing a better job teaching critical thinking?
Considering that that's roughly the population fatality rate in NYC, and significantly less than than the population fatality rate in Bergamo province, that seems unlikely.
Is the methodology available somewhere? Scenario 5 looks suspiciously like the geometric average of 0.2 and 1...
PFR in Italy based on one of the oldest populations in the world, with the worst NOx pollution in the world because of the mountains and industry, without controlling for confounding reasons for dying (e.g. all severe cases that hit the hospital counted and all mild cases that don't aren't).
But it is a reasonable number if you take into account that there were not enough tests to detect all cases. I assume that now they are getting antibody data and see that a lot more people caught this than they thought, not exhibiting symptoms or needing medical care.
And there are things we still don't know, about how it spreads (turns out not so much on surfaces), and about variants that are out there (why worse in NYC and Europe than in parts of asia and west coast?) And local conditions (NYC is very dense with subways, Northern Italy with intergenerational housing and smoking, etc). More data is always good.
> But it is a reasonable number if you take into account that there were not enough tests to detect all cases.
Assume every single person contracted it and testing is irrelevant in the calculation. Then you can adjust down to 90% contracted covid, or 80% or 20% or whatever to see how that affects things if you want to.
Start with deaths/population and see what number comes up. It's a really useful starting point. And a really useful skill to have to be able to check a supplied number with a back of the envelope calculation. I say do it! For more than one reason it's worthwhile.
IFR is a linear combination of age groups and their associated risk. It turns out NYC was an unmitigated disaster around nursing homes. That'll drive up the statistics quite a bit in that dead/population figure you're mentioning.
NYC has a median age of two years younger than the country as a whole. Age distribution is not a plausible explanation for NYC having a particularly large number of deaths from the outbreak.
It sounds like you are assuming the virus spreads uniformly through the population. It does not.
The median age of the population isn’t as relevant as the prevalence of the virus within specific demographics in the population.
NYC may have a slightly smaller elderly population, but that won’t matter if the prevalence of the virus in their elderly population is, say, 2x higher than the national average.
I’ve only been following it loosely, but apparently NYC brought the virus into their nursing homes by discharging SARS-CoV-2 positive patients back into them, and the IFR in a nursing home is certainly not 0.2%.
The original comment is putting a bound on the case fatality rate by simplistically assuming everyone has been infected. The actual prevalence in nursing homes is irrelevant with that assumption. Nursing homes being prone to infection just tightens the bound.
The population-wide total IFR could be as low as 0.26% but it would depend heavily on the demographics of the people infected.
If you infect 100 people under the age of 40 your IFR will likely be much lower than even 0.26%. If just 10 of those 100 are over 80 then it’s a totally different story.
Not all diseases have such a high spread in the mortality rate versus age as COVID, which spans effectively 0%-20%. It makes discussions on the average IFR less useful than they might otherwise be.
Note that the risks are dramatically different for different age groups, so if one calculates a grand total this requires assumptions about age distribution. The page notes the data is about the US.
Well, I've been following numbers for the last two months in different countries from different sources. My initial best estimations were that the fatality rate was about 0.77% given the numbers in South Korea (high number of tests). Other countries such Spain were reporting rates of about 10%, however testing was quite low in comparison.
Recently Spain did a seroprevalence test (number of people with antibodies for Coronavirus) with a large sample of people. They found that 5% of the population had antibodies (2.4M people). Which means that the fatality rate is actually about 1.1% and not 10%.
This numbers (from 0.77% to 1.16%) have been constant in different countries, so let me express my disbelief with the numbers published by the CDC.
0.26% is well below the % of people that die every year (~1%). I wonder how many of those people would have died this year regardless. We will be able to tell in retrospect if the annual death rate is not significantly moved versus last year.
Yes, it would be very helpful to have the following numbers:
1) mortality rate
2) no symptom rate
3) negative outcome rate
->(some clear impact to patient who has survived, but has life impacting effects)
So if you find for example that within a population of 100000 people that you have 35% with no symptoms, and 0.26% died, then 64%+ had symptoms, so then how many people had symptoms that likely are long-lasting. If for example 10% of people had long lasting impacts, then that is a far greater number than 0.26%.. so before people say "look it ain't so bad".. then we need to understand that number before people invite 100 people over to their house party.
Jokes aside. If the number was true, for Italy (33k reported deaths) this would give around 12M infected. For US (99k reported deaths) around 36M infected. Those numbers seem to be unrealistic. I remember Italy did some tests and even in the worst hit places less than 7% of population developed antibodies, not average 25% for entire Italy as suggested.
I know this is very, very back of envelop calculation but it would be nice to somehow reconcile those numbers.