Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Medicine

WHO Estimates Coronavirus Death Rate At 3.4 Percent -- Higher Than Earlier Estimates (latimes.com) 160

Posted by BeauHD from the contrary-to-popular-belief dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

WHO Estimates Coronavirus Death Rate At 3.4 Percent -- Higher Than Earlier Estimates More

WHO Estimates Coronavirus Death Rate At 3.4 Percent -- Higher Than Earlier Estimates

Comments Filter:

  • In addition to The Doctor , we could also use the help of Martha Jones.

  • Virus not spread by asymptomatic persons? Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @06:41PM (#59794036)
    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? This claim alone renders the rest of the text suspicious of being bullshit.

    • 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.

      • 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.

    • 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.

  • Source of 3.4%? Current post leads to 3rd party twitter account

    • Here you go. Next time Google it yourself.
      https://www.who.int/dg/speeche... [who.int]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        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

        • 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

          • The death rate for 40 to 49 year olds isn't what I would consider low. It's 0.4%. At 0.4% that means one in 250 would die. The 40 to 49 age group is pretty large, about 40 million people. Not all of those people are going to become infected, but at that death rate it would still lead to a lot of hospitalizations and deaths.

            • 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.

    • 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%

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by atisss ( 1661313 )

        That's not how to calculate CFR, and it would be very unprofessional if WHO is calculating it this way.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

          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."

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Cederic ( 9623 )

            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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Knuckles ( 8964 )

        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.

  • Ship Has Sailed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @07:07PM (#59794172)

    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.

  • A handy market. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @07:32PM (#59794310) Journal

    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.

    • The invisible hand of the market has spoken and making money is more important than saving lives.

      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

    • 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.

    • 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

      • Current prices are at 20 euro per single-use mask at various websites. Dunno why you would call that cheap.

  • 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

    • 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.

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • *cough* *cough* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @07:58PM (#59794436) Journal

    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.

    • 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.

    • Initially, it was quite low, under 2%. But, as updated numbers came in daily, the ratio creeped up slowly until it hit 3.4%. It seems that have stabilized there. Maybe that's what the WHO is using to come up with 3.4%, it's the moving average of the total confirmed/deaths. Since the moving average has stabilized, it's now a good indicator.

  • ... 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

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        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.

  • Without specifying exactly what he means by the death rate in this context, and how it was computed, it's kind of meaningless. E.g. is it just deaths so far divided by reported cases, averaged in some non-obvious way? Is it an estimate of the proportional of cases that will eventually die (and if so, given what assumptions on demographics and health care?)

    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

Slashdot Top Deals

Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.

Close