Apples and oranges. But important anyway. People here “3.4%”, and they think “if I am exposed, I’m going to die”.
So having some idea of the fatality rate among people who are actually exposed is important.
ESPECIALLY since we are entering a phase where we are going to do widespread testing of groups of people who were exposed, rather than groups that show symptoms.
My best example now is the first cruise ship. Tested everybody. The results, about 705 positives, and of those, 410 were asymptomatic, meaning they wouldn’t have been tested normally. That leaves 295 tested with symptoms.
Now, 295 sypmtomatic, and 7 deaths, gives you a “death rate” of about 2.4%.
But if you heard that they found 705 cases on the ship, and knew the “2.4%” number, you would think that there were 17 people dead.
So, that other number, total mortality rate, is important, especially for public perception.
And frankly, the important number is that it is below 1%. For some reason, people think that the flu is nothing, even though it kills 1 out of every thousand people who get symptoms or more, meaning 10s of thousands of people are dying, yet only 40% get the vaccine.
But people assume that if they get coughed on by someone with coronavirus, they will 100% get infected, and have a 3% chance of dying. Neither of those are true, but it is how the media is presenting this.
I will note that it's not just the media that is suggesting/implying this.
Keep in mind that the DP had a lot of resources hyper-focused on it.
When we’re talking about the general public in a non-quarantined environment things will be completely different. All we can take from the DP experiment is that
*anybody can contract it
*it spreads very fast even among ‘quarantined’ people
*old people are hardest hit
*1% (7 of 705) died even with a whole country’s resources deployed to save them
Admittedly, this was still very early and no doubt the professionals will have adapted somewhat. But the people being blasé about this are a danger to the rest of us.