Posted on 03/03/2020 3:07:04 PM PST by kristinn
World health officials said Tuesday the case fatality rate for COVID-19 is 3.4% globally, higher than previous estimates of about 2%.
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected, he said.
...During a press briefing Monday, WHO officials said they don’t know how COVID-19 behaves, saying it’s not like influenza. They added that while much is known about the seasonal flu, such as how it’s transmitted and what treatments work to suppress the disease, that same information is still in question when it comes to the coronavirus.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Already have a bet going, loser donates to FR. I really want to lose this one.
One bet per pandemic is my limit...
I don't think one can claim what percentage of people are dying because we have such a small sample....
My point isn't that thes numbers are proof-positive facts that the 2017-2018 US influenza strain was deadlier than coronavirus. My point is that we CAN perform calculations, we CAN understand drawbacks to this or that number...and we can MAKE INFERENCES.
Yes, there may be some apples to oranges in my numbers. Hospitalizations aren't resolved cases...but at least my numbers are fruit salad.
But the ‘but flu’ trolls will glom onto that 7.5% number to claim the flu is more dangerous. Probably even before I finish this post..
FR is a place where we usually have the ability to make reasoned, cogent assessments wth imperfect information is a state of life. Rarely do we get perfection...yet increasingly many here like to make inferences that are just nuts - akin to global warming simulations and R0 estimates at this stage of the epidemic. But some estimates ARE fair, and we will have to plow through the trolls.
You are completely twisting around what my point is. I never ever said let the old just die.
Again my whole point is......for the last time.....I will summarize my points here....covid-19 is more contagious than flu, but it is killing far less percentage of people than did SARS, Ebola, bird flu etc, it is almost not killing any healthy adult under age 60, and therefore we do not need to crawl into a shell and abandon activities we enjoy. And the Trump admin has been far more active and taking preventive actions lot sooner than Obama admin did for the pandemic which occurred during it’s 8 years.
Still much higher than the regular flu.
“Better to go with deaths per 100,000 population that they use for flu.”
That would be a valid argument but for the fact that flu is endemic to the whole world and this is a new disease that is not - and hopefully never becomes - endemic. So right now it’s as meaningless as frogs per square mile in the Sahara, and not the French-speaking kind.
Gravity’s waiting period is about 9.8 m/s^2
Thanks...another FReeper said it first, and let me use it. I’m not that witty.
I think generally people , not FR, have got to get more informed on what is happening in this world...
” and we will have to plow through the trolls.”
Heh, heh, doing my best. :)
Preach it brother! (or sister)
Remove me from your ping list.
With GREAT pleasure.
I think we'll both be happier...
Good. Thank you.
a reckoning is coming and none of us are going to like it....
Yes, CV is less lethal than the other diseases you listed, and yes it is far more contagious than the flu. But it is also far more contagious than those other diseases and that offsets the “good news” that it is not as lethal.
I think you are being short sighted about the ramifications of this and the demographic it affects. For example, my church is chock full of old people. My wife is immune compromised to some degree. So even though I and my children are unlikely to get seriously ill from this, we are surrounded by people that are. So if I go bopping around in the midst of this outbreak I put people around me at risk. It’s not the flu, which as I have pointed out, is endemic to the whole world. It is much more dangerous, but not yet endemic. Slowing it down gives us time to come up the countermeasures. That will save lives, including at-risk people’s lives. So denigrating and belittling people as they try to assess the threat and diminishing the threat itself are not helpful.
I haven’t seen a single serious post blaming Trump for any of this. Yes, a few of the resident nut jobs have asserted that the evil gub’mint gonna kill us all and such, but no rational person thinks Trump is in any way responsible for this. And, frankly, the responses to Dem, MSM and Deep State assertions that it is somehow his fault are laughable and easily countered.
Trump isn’t the government. He’s an American.
Here is my prediction...by end of spring, news about covid-19 will be on 13th+ page of NY Times. If I am wrong, please let me know on 1st day of summer.
The Chinese numbers are bogus. Once the health care system in Wuhan collapsed there are no further direct numbers of any value. All we have are whistleblower reports from inside Wuhan and circumstantial evidence to go on. It looks really bad in Wuhan, but that’s going to be a matter for the forensics teams later. Rather than assume that only 1 in 1000 have been infected we can just as validly assume that 999 in 1000 have been infected. Or 1000 in 1000. But we don’t know and won’t know for a long time.
What we do know is that the rest of the world is struggling to contain this and people are dying from it in enough numbers that many governments are employing draconian measures. We know that people that aren’t even showing symptoms, and who may never show symptoms, are infecting others. We know that it has spread to over 1/3 of the world’s countries. We know that it has met the definition of pandemic in spite of falling short of some arbitrary body counts. We know that a lot of cases are still unresolved. Those are all facts.
Dismissing this as insignificant is premature. Wielding bogus Chinese statistics is disingenuous.
Why do people still believe the numbers out of Hubei? That’s alarmingly naive. Once the health care system in Wuhan collapsed the numbers became entirely meaningless. Even if you believed the numbers from the CCP prior to them completely cutting off Wuhan. Which no sensible person did.
June 20. Hope you’re right.
I and my family don’t even have to leave the house until then if we don’t want to. My wife and I are helping to set up the church to live-stream so all those old folks in the congregation can attend from home. I imagine there will be a lot more of this sort of thing going forward. It will be a fixture of our society, I expect.
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