WHO Estimates Coronavirus Death Rate At 3.4 Percent -- Higher Than Earlier Estimates (latimes.com) 160
The World Health Organization is warning that the novel coronavirus could be far more dangerous than the flu, with a mortality rate of 3.4%. The new estimates come as the U.S. death toll from the virus reaches 9. From a report: The global mortality rate -- which includes more than 3,000 deaths -- is many times higher than the "mortality rate" of the flu, which is less than 1%. WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that is at least partly because COVID-19 is a new disease, and no one has built up an immunity to it. Still, Tedros reiterated the WHO's belief that containment was still within reach. "We don't even talk about containment for seasonal flu," Tedros said. "It's just not possible, but it's possible for COVID-19." Officials say they have learned the coronavirus is less transmissible than the flu, which is often spread by people who are infected yet don't have symptoms. That doesn't seem to be the case for COVID-19, he said. "There are not yet any vaccines or therapeutics, which is why we must do everything we can to contain it."
Tedros said he's concerned by shortages of masks, gowns and other equipment needed by healthcare workers to stop the spread of disease "caused by rising demands and hoarding and misuse." "We can't stop COVID-19 without protecting our health workers," said Tedros, noting that prices of surgical masks have increased sixfold.
Tedros said he's concerned by shortages of masks, gowns and other equipment needed by healthcare workers to stop the spread of disease "caused by rising demands and hoarding and misuse." "We can't stop COVID-19 without protecting our health workers," said Tedros, noting that prices of surgical masks have increased sixfold.
WHO ? (Score:2)
In addition to The Doctor , we could also use the help of Martha Jones.
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"Who is Martha Jones ?"
Dr. Helen Sharpe.
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Who is Martha Jones ?
On of the more forgettable companions, she wasn't as angsty as Rose Tyler, as sarcastic and as Donna Noble, or as charismatic Amy Pond, and not flamboyant like Jake Harkness, but at at least she wasn't a giant Mary Sue like Clara Oswald.
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Virus not spread by asymptomatic persons? Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
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How can somebody claim the virus is not spread by people experiencing any adverse symptoms
If you look at what is written, they didn't make that claim: "Officials say they have learned the coronavirus is less transmissible than the flu, which is often spread by people who are infected yet don't have symptoms."
What this means is that yes it is spread but asymptomatic people but not often. This simply means that during the incubation period that it's not terrible contagious but can still be spread.
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This simply means that during the incubation period that it's not terrible contagious but can still be spread.
Which in itself is no surprise as while you're asymptomatic you're not doing things like coughing into your hand or sneezing on other people's stuff.
Re:Virus not spread by asymptomatic persons? Bulls (Score:5, Insightful)
How can somebody claim the virus is not spread by people experiencing any adverse symptoms while there are literally interviews on TV with medical staff in quarantine who have been tested positively for the Corona virus and quite obviously do not suffer from anything?
There's no logical contradiction there. You could test positive and not be contagious until you begin to show symptoms. As Gravis Zero points out it also fits if asymptomatic people can but usually don't infect others, unlike the flu.
cat got my tongue (Score:2)
Source of 3.4%? Current post leads to 3rd party twitter account
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Here you go. Next time Google it yourself.
https://www.who.int/dg/speeche... [who.int]
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Of course the big problem is how to interpret that number. What everyone wants to know is, how likely am I to die if I catch this thing. That 3.4% number may be nearly useless for answering that.
I'm looking at one dataset now which show 92800 cases diagnosed and 3168 deaths -- so 3.4% of the diagnosed cases having died is precisely correct. But if you start digging down into the statistics, you see stuff like this:
South Korea: 5186 cases total, 34 deaths, and only 34 recoveries.
So one (wrong) way of look
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The total varies wildly by age. When you break it down, I've yet to hear of one death under age 10. The mortality rate is pretty low even for 50 and under. For 70+ that rate hits 10-15%. Without going by age, 20% if cases need acute care to ensure survival.
At the individual level, your direct risk is low unless you're older. But let's say this thing spreads like wildfire because so few people are tested and so many people never get sick enough to show symptoms. It wouldn't be a shock to say half the c
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Don't get me wrong. Even 0.4% is several times deadlier than the flu. I was only taking about survival rate being high for all but the highest age brackets. The impact is going to be huge of it spreads quickly, and it probably already has.
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Do the math yourself in real-time:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/op... [arcgis.com]
As of an hour ago 92,818 people have been infected globally. 3,159 of those have already died. That's 3.4%
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That's not how to calculate CFR, and it would be very unprofessional if WHO is calculating it this way.
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It is exactly how WHO calculated it.
But they didn't talk about death rates, the proper quote is "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died."
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Thank you, that makes far more sense than the misleading Slashdot summary.
That's a simple factual statement, not an assumption laden estimate. Actual death rate is very variable, relies on the healthcare provision and response from local authorities, and tends to be higher during initial stages of introduction into a jurisdiction than it is after processes, procedures and treatments are optimised.
So it'll be a while before longer term death rates are known, but the WHO acknowledge that outside of Hubei the
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92,818 people have been infected globally.
Not true. Those are tested and confirmed, mostly because of symptoms. We know that most infected people develop no or benign symptoms and are never reported as they notice nothing or atrribute it to common cold or flu.
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Ship Has Sailed (Score:5, Insightful)
it's possible for COVID-19
Containment is not possible. It's too damned late. Health care workers everywhere some traveler has had primary or secondary contact are testing positive.
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It actually made quite a dent in CO2 emissions. And it has already saved more lives due to reduced pollution than were lost to it in China.
Not all bad for the species, but it sucks for individuals. I myself am in the at-risk group so I'm updating my life insurance policies.
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It could have other weird social effects, especially if it has a high death rate among older people.
I keep wondering what happens if we lose 10% of the population over 70.
Politically -- the average age of the US Congress and Senate is nearly sixty, all the likely Presidential candidates are over 70. What kind of power/policy shift happens if half the Congress loses 10% of its members, many the most powerful?
What about economically? I'd wager that a disproportionate amount of wealth is held by the vulnerab
A handy market. (Score:4, Interesting)
Tedros said he's concerned by shortages of masks, gowns and other equipment needed by healthcare workers to stop the spread of disease "caused by rising demands and hoarding and misuse." "We can't stop COVID-19 without protecting our health workers," said Tedros, noting that prices of surgical masks have increased sixfold.
The invisible hand of the market has spoken and making money is more important than saving lives.
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Either that or the supply of surgical masks has been used up already (what, you thought that a doctor making rounds is going to use just the one?), and the supply of material to make the masks is still in China (or wherever we get the stuff - hell, the masks might be made in China, for all I know) or wherever, held up from delivery by the quarantine(s)....
Or do you really believe that every medical establishmen
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The invisible hand of the market has spoken and making money is more important than saving lives.
False. Supply and demand pricing does not assume that the only point is to make money. In some cases saving lives is more important so you purposely price masks such that people don't try and horde them and the supply remains accessible to the medical industry.
If you think some fat cat is getting rich by selling a few masks you're insanely delusional.
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The invisible hand of the market has spoken, and now that the price of surgical masks is six times higher, manufacturers will switch to making surgical masks in order to make up the necessary supply.
Meanwhile, surgical masks are cheap, and a 6X rise in their price won't bankrupt any medical system.
Verdict: the market works
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Current prices are at 20 euro per single-use mask at various websites. Dunno why you would call that cheap.
The "Global" death rate isn't *local*. (Score:2)
You'd expect death rates to be higher where the medical care is not as good, either because it just isn't, or because it's been overwhelmed with cases.
Right now the death rate is going to be dominated by China, and within China it is dominated by Wuhan. China has had over 80,000 cases; 29785 cases have been resolved by recovery, 2945 have been resolved by death. On the Diamond Princess there were 706 cases, so far 100 have been resolved by recovery, six by death. Of the 600 remaining active cases on the s
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Another reason the death rate will be so apparently high in places with less healthcare is because non-terminal cases are less likely to be detected and counted.
I think the press should always report the death rate as a percentage of the entire population along with the death rate among those detected, because otherwise people are bound to confuse the tw
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I guess the correct thing to do to gauge the *impact* is to count *excess deaths*: how many deaths in excess of what you'd expect, say within some reasonable confidence interval. This would also count people who are killed as a result of secondary without being infected themselves.
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Worst cases are countries like Japan, 6 dead - 43 recovered, Italy (who had thought about that?) 80 dead - 160 recovered, Iran 80 dead - 290 recovered, South Korea 28 dead - 30 recovered.
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Don't forget the US where we currently have more deaths than recoveries. Clearly this virus kills more than 50% of the people it infects.
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Clearly this virus kills more than 50% of the people it infects.
No, in most countries it is below 1% and many have 0%.
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I apologize for the lack of proper sarcasm tags.
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Diamond Princess is a cruise ship, and cruise ship passengers are older than average than people in general. Presumably this is especially true in Asia where birthrates are extremely low. So Diamond Princess passengers were presumably significantly more vulnerable to coronavirus than the population as a whole.
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*cough* *cough* (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what I've been saying...
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Updated numbers, from people with known outcomes:
Total Deaths: 3,160
Total Recovered: 48,226
Total Known Outcomes: 51,386 (extrapolated by adding the above two numbers)
3,160 / 51,386 = 6.1%
Thus of all the people we know the outcome for, 6.1% died.
We can assume that the Total Recovered value may not be as complete as the Total Deaths (again, it is easier to count dead bodies than people who tested positive, had minor symptoms, recovered, and went on their way). So I'm still estimating that the actual mortality rate is around 4-5%, as I said in my comment a week ago.
What will happen over time is the mortality rate calculated by the Total Confirmed (currently 92,821, giving a rate of 3.4% as discussed in TFA) will continue to approach the above 6.1%. We still are at a point where only around 50% of those confirmed have recovered, so the mortality rate will continue to increase when calculated using that method.
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Total Deaths: 3,160
Total Recovered: 48,226
Total Known Outcomes: 51,386 (extrapolated by adding the above two numbers)
3,160 / 51,386 = 6.1%
Thus of all the people we know the outcome for, 6.1% died.
We can assume that the Total Recovered value may not be as complete as the Total Deaths (again, it is easier to count dead bodies than people who tested positive, had minor symptoms, recovered, and went on their way). So I'm still estimating that the actual mortality rate is around 4-5%, as I said in my comment a week ago.
The 4-5% is likely an upper-bound number. If it's true that large numbers of people are asymptomatic but infected, then the true mortality rate should be quite a bit lower as the denominator is almost certainly much higher than known numbers.
3.4% is the 7 day moving average. (Score:3)
WARNING: THIS NUMBER DOESN'T MEAN (Score:2)
... WHAT YOU THINK IT DOES.
It is technically correct as far as it goes: if you add up confirmed deaths and divide by confirmed deaths, you get 3.4%. However what people really want to know is this: if I get this thing what is the chance I'm going to die? You can't use that 3.4% number for that because both the numerator and denominator represents a population that is not relevant to you.
The death figures are dominated by numbers from China which accounts for 92% of deaths worldwide. If the same virus were
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Viruses do change over time. The second round of the Spanish flu was much more deadly than the first, although the people who survived the first weren't as affected by round two according to the wikipedia article. So it isn't a given that if the virus emerged again next year people would be better off. It just depends on how or if it has changed. Also, if the first round gets really bad, it will be harder to handle the next round even if you know what is coming.
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True. But if it's going to mutate worse, it's most likely to do it when there is a lot of virus in circulation. I'm not too concerned about that, because it doesn't change what we should be doing *now*. Even if this is equivalent to a mild flu year, that's over ten thousand *preventable* deaths we're talking about.
Death rate (Score:2)
It's an almost totally meaningless figure, and given the previous pronouncements of the WHO, I really would not expect any new insight to come from wha
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What the fuck are you on about?
54,274 people had this virus and now no longer have it. 3,204 of them are now dead. There are two numbers there, I'll let you do the maths yourself.
Total number infected is over 93,576. So there's another number you can use, but you have to make assumptions on whether the ones still infected will die or not.
Total number of actual infections is unknown, as there will be undiagnosed infections. But you can model this, and still produce numbers.
At no point is there a 'NaN' involv
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Re:Just a lie (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, the propagandists are out today, did they hire you to astro-turf for the election and then drag you into this since trump fears being blamed for poor response?
FYI, death rate for flu is 0.1%, so death rate of corona virus at 3.4% is 34 times HIGHER, not lower
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Seriously, who are these derps who can't do basic math?
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33 times higher. 34 times as high.
(But actually, it's likely higher than 3.4%.)
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Some flus are higher, like 0.5%
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And if even 40% of Americans get C19 there will be millions dead.
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Along with all the other accidents, people with cancer, people who needed ICU care...
Decades of averages every year can allow US private, gov and charity hospital wards, ICU to be ready each and every year.
There problem is the really simple math of wuflu... its not math the ICU use rate of "regular flu this season"
Many more people will see their local doctor.
Many more people will need to see a
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False. Death vs recovery cannot be used as a primary indicator when those figures are tiny compared to currently active cases. Do a bit more math.
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Reading Comprehension, its a thing... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Hell, the first line of the quote tells you the figure (approx) for flu.
The problem with COVID-19 is not its mortality rate, its more subtle - it appears to be able to spread highly effectively, survive outside the body for some time, and avoids developed immunity.. however there are a lot of unknowns around those..
The impressive thing though is how little effort governments seem to be putting in BEFORE it arrives.
Japan pretty much bread a shipload for the world, Border testing is low and late pretty much e
Firesale on karma (Score:2)
NaN% rate < flu rate == NaB.
Same for >, <=, >=, and so on. How exactly are you comparing a quantity you imply ("It's still..") to a known quantity, when the quantity you want to compare is an unknown, kinda by definition?
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https://www.arcgis.com/apps/op... [arcgis.com]
As of an hour ago 92,818 people have been infected globally. 3,159 of those have already died. That's 3.4%
At least 3.4%.
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https://www.arcgis.com/apps/op... [arcgis.com]
As of an hour ago 92,818 people have been infected globally. 3,159 of those have already died. That's 3.4%
At least 3.4%.
92,818 people have gotten sick enough to seek medical attention, or have otherwise been diagnosed. Apparently, some unknown percentage of the people who get this virus have relatively mild "just one of those bugs" illness, and would not be counted in that 92,818.
So, it's 3.4% of those who come to the attention of the medical profession, somewhat less for those infected in general.
It's still pretty dang bad, of course.
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Yes, I'm just pointing out where they're getting 3.4% from.
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I'll also add that those were people they had a reason to test, not necessarily people sick enough or even showing any symptoms. People who came in close contact with others infected, etc.
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It's rubbery in both directions.
It is true that we don't know the number of people who are/were infected and who have not been tested. But we also don't know the number of people who have a positive test (92,818) and who have not YET died, but will do so.
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Yes: please remember that this is also the same basis to calculate the mortality for influenza. So you can compare that 0.1% with this 3.4% quite well. Currently the USA stands at 7% though.
Analysis from China indicates:
Another recent study, considered the largest on COVID-19 cases to date, researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Protection, analyzed 44,672 confirmed cases in China between Dec. 31, 09 and Feb. 11, 2020. Of those cases, 80.9% (or 36,160 cases) were considered mild, 13.8% (6,168 cases) severe and 4.7% (2,087) critical. "Critical cases were those that exhibited respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction/failure," the researchers wrote in the paper published in China CDC Weekly.
(source: https://www.livescience.com/ne... [livescience.com])
Here's the interesting bit:
AHA data: According to the AHA 2015 annual survey, the United States had 4862 acute care registered hospitals; 2814 of these had at least 10 acute care beds and at least 1 ICU bed. These hospitals had a total of 540,668 s
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Dumbass (Score:3)
92818 people _have sought medical help_ because their symptoms were severe. A lot more have been infected. Most of them have few to no symptoms, and never go to the doctor.
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Not true. They've tested people showing no symptoms who they've had reason to suspect had heavy exposure. They can't test the entire population obviously, there aren't enough kits.
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Same with Flu ...
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We don't actually know the number of people infected globally, that's the trouble. No-one even noticed it was spreading in Italy for who knows how long until it hit a particularly vulnerable group of elderly people with existing conditions and set off alarm bells.
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Agreed. That also makes the WHO's recent claim that it's not very contagious/infectious a head-scratcher. Does the flu usually out of nowhere infect everyone in a room at once? Before anyone even shows symptoms?
Seems to me we're entering the "Quick, tell bigger lies!" phase.
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Re: Firesale on karma (Score:2)
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Medical resources and technology in the US far outstrip those in Asia. ...
But they are only available for a few privileged
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Yet so far, US has the highest mortality rate of any country, including China (with one exception of the Philippines where one person has died out of total 3 having fallen sick). And that is by a large margin: currently just above 7% (compared to for example 3.7% for China, 0.59% for South Korea, 3.2% for Italy, 3.3% for Iran to list a few). Source: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
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The WHO is not made up out of the same illiterates the US chooses to put in power. They employ former doctors. And yes, these do take those things into account. There's even a well-established science for it, just to make this sort of predictions: epidemiology. Those people know what they're doing.
But let's suppose you are correct and they didn't factor it in. In that case, let's just look at Northern Italy's figures, which is a quite rich part in Italy with very good hospitals (been inside them, and those
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Except home medical care in the US is liable to be in healthier conditions with access to good nutrition and meds than hospital care in china
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I think conferences should proceed but adapt a "no obviously sick people will be allowed to attend" policy. That seems like a good compromise,
Not to the people that have already paid for their plane tickets, hotel, etc.
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No it *is* spread early, just not as readily as with flu. Look at it this way, a kick in the shin doesn't hurt as much as a kick in the nuts, but it still hurts.
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If you're going to compare it to flu, you might as well use the same criteria as the flu. Will give you a more meaningful comparison.
Best to use totals from countries with public health systems and not to trust US statistics, where most people avoid the doctor even when sick due to cost.
That said, the cruise ship is an isolated cross-section, and we know exactly how many were infected (assuming the test was fairly accurate over multiple administrations). In that case, it was at least 8 times more deadly t
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Cruise shit is not an unbiased sample. It's more likely to have older people on it.
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Cruise shit is not an unbiased sample. It's more likely to have older people on it.
Tambien:
Close quarters, constrained environment, shared drinking and eating facilities, crew members to spread the virus even after lockdown limits the movement of passengers (since they must still be fed/tended to)...
It's like being trapped in a school full of children where the kids don't go home. For days on end.
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There are no unbiased samples.
China - there is chance that numbers are underreported, because historically that has been happening.
Iran - also high chance of underreporting, because of totalitarian government
Italy, South Korea - critical or death ratio to confirmed are magnitudes off from each other, so there are some unknown factors.
France, Germany, Spain - public health system, but sample size is too small to get any meaningful results.
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South Korea tests far more people, but they've also had some very recent spikes and those cases have neither recovered nor died.
Smoking rates seem similar between them if that might be a factor.
Really, with as many cases as stand unresolved, it's hard to get accurate statistics unless we subtract all cases diagnosed less than x days ago.
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Sure, it is not the same as the general population, but at least the exact demographics can be factored into the analysis.
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https://www.arcgis.com/apps/op... [arcgis.com]
Re:Grade A purified horseshit (Score:5, Informative)
There have been numerous studies with exhaustive testing of subpopulations (workers, apartment blocks, healthcare workers) in China. This ist not just about dividing rough numbers found on the Internet.
Also this isn't all that easy. Once the virus is in the wild infections multiply exponentially (on average doubling every 6.4 days). This means that at any given point in time there are much more infected people who have been infected only for a short time than those who already have been infected for longer. Death occurs usually in the third week after infection though. This causes the numbers of the dying to be deceptively small compared to the total number of the infected as long as the virus is still spreading through the population. Those who will die still die a week or two or three later, but until then there are 2, 4 or 8 times as many freshly infected than before.
Your "iceberg" theory (which assumes that the death rate is smaller than it appears to be because there are lots of undetected infections) has been thoroughly debunked meanwhile. Just like the "only Chinese die from it" one before.
The death rate is not just the number of those who have died compared to the known infected but it is also not just the number of those who have died compared to all infected at any point in time. It's the percentage of those who will die from the infection compared to all infected. Death lags infection by two or three weeks and as long as the number of the freshly infected are still rising fast you will underestimate the percentage of the dying.
So you really need to look at exhaustively tested subpopulations so you can find all infected among them and then look at how many of them will die from the infection over time. Only this will give you the true mortality rate.
And of course this will change a lot with treatment. If you can supply intensive care including artificial ventilation there will be much fewer deaths than otherwise. Once all your ICUs are swamped and you can just put the severely ill down on stretchers in a stadium, well. Even in the less severe cases hospital care makes a difference, like antibiotics to avoid secondary infections.
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Yes, there have been numerous studies that aren't just dividing rough numbers. They've generally estimated a substantially lower death rate than 3.4 percent.
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Well, you don't have *the* denominator, but you have *a* denominator: people you've been able to diagnose. Generally that means whenever your'e talking about a "death rate" you're talking about the rate of death for people under medical care.
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I would not be surprised to find that China continues to have a high infection rate though they claim otherwise.
Totally different than in the US then?
Also, almost all we know of this virus and the decease it causes we know from studies in China. Better don't believe anything and do it all over again, just better and more thoroughly and more honestly. I'm waiting.
Re:Surprise. China has lied. (Score:5, Insightful)
People on the right and left are trying to frame this event in terms that are politically familiar: who is at fault.
The fact is, even if we did all the right things, stuff like this would happen; and nobody ever manages to do all the right things. There are things that China could have done better, there are things the Trump administration could have done better, and for whatever shortcomings in their response, they deserve criticism. But blame is not really where we should be focused right now. We need to be looking forward, not back. When it's over, then break out your knives.
We live in a world of seven billion people linked by jet travel. The world is a microbe's banquet. Not only was something like this inevitable, it's going to happen again and again. It's an emergent feature of the modern world.
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Until someone tells them that the 3.4 will all be in the over 50 age group - which means management (and a few janitors). The decision maker in any large organization is certain to be over 50.