Coronavirus death rate is lower than previously reported, study says, but it's still deadlier than seasonal flu

CNN ^ | 03/30/2020 | Arman Azad

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

The actual death rate is MUCH lower. My cousin and his wife (up in age) went to Israel a couple of months ago and half of the group got sick with symptoms identical to this Chinese virus. They recovered and came home (some probably spread it here). Sounds like they had this very virus. It's been here, a BUNCH of people have already had it and recovered. It is probably just a little more virulent than the flu.

Democrats and the media are trying to crash the economy with irrational fear over this and are succeeding in tanking the economy. They haven't got to Trump....yet.

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

The bean counters have no idea how widespread this thing is right now. That number would drastically lower the rate of death.

Exactly, but that doesn't fit the agenda.

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

An interesting theory was that it came from China. The researcher had dug through the reports on the laborers that were imported from China to help with the war effort.

That IS the truth, but the media is not covering it.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: we have plenty of open beds at my hospital in preparation for the “surge” but it hasn’t happened

What area do you live in?

[Magnatron]

But the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was perhaps 10-20 x as deadly here in the US.

I see this touted many times as a comparison, but we need to be careful to understand that 1918 medicine and medical procedures were medieval in comparison to today’s.

[Svartalfiar]

Stop posting your bogus stats. You aren’t including South Korea which has the single most accurate statistic because they’ve had the most widespread testing. And they are right around the 1 and a fraction percent this article states. But this article is absolutely right that the true death rate absolutely has to go down once asymptomatic cases are factored in.

SKorea has had the most widespread testing out of any bigger country (only Bahrain is better, but they're too small to be very accurate for worldly extrapolation). So their incidence rate of asymptomatic carriers wandering the populace should be much lower than ours here or anywhere else. They will have found the majority of those people already, who are therefore mostly reflected in the 'total' and 'recovered' numbers.

Per Johns Hopkins numbers, they currently have 165 deaths and 5567 recoveries, out of 9887 cases so far. This gives us:
Current mortality rate: 2.88%
Best-Case CFR: 1.67%

If we assume even a 20% asymptomatic, unknown carriers, which is probably what the general populace is elsewhere, but we'll use it here, we get:
Current mortality rate: 2.40%
Best-Case CFR: 1.39%

[Svartalfiar]

Seems to be a flawed comparison. If it we not for the seasonal flu vaccine how many more infections/ deaths wold there be? 10x? 100?

Not even close. Influenza barely kills anyone as it is, and the flu vaccine doesn't even do anything one out of three, maybe four years? It's just a guess as to what strains are in the vaccine, And if they guess wrong, then the vaccine is basically useless. Less than useless, from all the complications/flu it causes. Even when they guess right, or half-right, the vaccines are grown in chicken eggs, where it mutates and isn't an exact match for the estimated strain. If they get a 40-50% success, it's considered a really good year. Not to mention, most years just under half the US population even gets it. So removing the vaccine wouldn't even affect 165MM people.

So no flu vaccine, you probably might see a doubling of cases, but definitely not 10x or 100x fewer.

For the Wuhan virus, though, an actual vaccine should be much more effective than the flu's. For this particular coronavirus, you don't have all the subtypes that flu does. There's one, with slight mutations as it spreads. Flu has four different types, A, B, C, and D. (Although C does almost nothing, and D doesn't infect humans.) A has nearly 200 combinations of H# and N# (one has 11 options, the other has 18), and while not all of those infect humans or are even found to exist naturally, any given one also has multiple strains within that particular H#N#. Flu B also has a couple different groups, but not nearly as big a family as A.

BUT, how many people are going to be willing to take a coronavirus vaccine? IF it's the potential one developed in China? No one with any sense will take it. If it's one rushed out in the midst of the panic? Any somewhat smart person will definitely want to wait to see what it does to all the dumb people. I think right now our best bet is the quinine treatment, with remdesivir or the other treatments going for people who can't take quinine, or for whom it doesn't work.

[Peter ODonnell]

Kids gather round and I’ll tell you the story of the great corona virus scare of 2020, that’s when grandpa went off to the camps for fifteen years because he wore a red hat and ...

[Grampa Dave]

More fake news crap from CrapNewsNetwork posing as news.

[Grampa Dave]

I heard you can catch the Chinese Flu just by being within 100 yards of a Television with CNN on??

Also, by reading Fake Flu News from CrapNewsNetwork on Free Republic.

Both ways of spreading this terrible disease is a disaster as it will kill or maim everyone afflicted via CNN.