No kidding. Doing the math S.Korea fatality rate is a little over 0.7%. Kinda like the flu. And that does not take into account mild cases not reported. However, given S.Korea’s excellent testing that may be close to a good number.
Interesting trends we're starting to see in SK and the US.
Fatality rates <1.0% in S.K.
Fatalities per day, declining in S.K and flat in the U.S.
Average age of deceased patients in the US, 80 years-old, with all of them being older than 69 years-old and most all of them, if not all of them, with pre-existing conditions.
So much for that exponential graph I saw here yesterday.
“No kidding. Doing the math S.Korea fatality rate is a little over 0.7%. Kinda like the flu. And that does not take into account mild cases not reported. However, given S.Korea’s excellent testing that may be close to a good number.”
So many things wrong with this.
S. Korea is certainly doing the most comprehensive testing so we are getting the best numbers from there, however, your claim that it does not take the mild cases into account is false. Given the level of testing (150K+), everybody that even might have been exposed is being tested.
Even if there were undetected mild cases, that is certainly the case for the flu as well, and since those are not counted for the flu it is an invalid comparison.
Also, that 0.7% number assumes that all the unresolved cases will recover which, while I hope that’s the case, is altogether unlikely (4 died in the last day or so, for example). Allocating all those cases to the “win” column is overly optimistic at best or disingenuous at worst.
And the flu, which in many years comes close to saturating our health care system, doesn’t put as high a percentage into the hospital as this or for as long as this, on average has a fatality rate of 0.1%. So at 0.7% (optimistic) you still clog up all our hospitals and lose 7 times as many people. Once the hospitals are overwhelmed, the fatality rate shoots up sharply (Wuhan, Iran, Italy), and other things that might have been treatable get pushed aside (heart attacks, etc.)
This is why containment is crucial. While containment isn’t actually feasible anymore (thanks, butflubros!), containment efforts still slow down the spread and buy time for countermeasures. Lockdowns and quarantines help with containment, so being prepared for one in your locale is simply common sense.
It's not. South Korea is being extremely draconian in their attempt to stop the virus but in a different way than China.
They went full big brother. They identify everyone, including name and address, who has the virus and sends texts to anyone who is in the vicinity letting them know that they're close to an infected person. They track the people with the virus to trace their movements and see if they're breaking quarantine. They are doing mass quarantines by repurposing buildings and what not as quarantine centers to stop the infected from overrunning the hospitals. They are going full bore on tracing and isolating victims. They are automatically quarantining for 2 weeks all who want to enter the country. So no, they didn't have to lock down cities but they are still doing things that nobody in America will stand for. Our fate is going to be quite different. Honestly it's going to be closer to Iran or Italy in the US.
So we can't use these numbers to show the true death rate. Not unless we're as hyper vigilant and proactive.