Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude.

WSJ ^ | March 24, 2020 | Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya

[FreedomNotSafety]

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.

[kabar]

Did you check out the link I provided you?

[lepton]

By the way, while it seemed obvious right off that the fatalities/case formula was misleading, I also found these references which expand on the idea:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/#correct

One issue can be that of determining whether there is enough data to estimate T with any precision, but it is certainly not T = 0 (what is implicitly used when applying the formula current deaths / current cases to determine CFR during an ongoing outbreak).

And

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/162/5/479/82647

Methods for Estimating the Case Fatality Ratio for a Novel, Emerging Infectious Disease
A. C. Ghani, C. A. Donnelly, D. R. Cox, J. T. Griffin, C. Fraser, T. H. Lam, L. M. Ho, W. S. Chan, R. M. Anderson, A. J. Hedley ... Show more
American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 162, Issue 5, 1 September 2005, Pages 479–486, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwi230

[Svartalfiar]

Did you check out the link I provided you?

Yes, and it proves my point that the real flu numbers are greatly inflated. Not only are the confirmed Flu numbers low, but much of the deaths and half the stats on the page aren't even the Flu - they're flu + pneumonia, which is misleading because pneumonia can have a LOT of other causes, or "influenza-like-illness". That second one is so vague, just about any minor sickness can be counted as "flu-like" in that category.

[kabar]

[Svartalfiar]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374803/

I don't have time to try and hunt down data from recent years, but I can tell you from recent conversations that this year's infection estimate is about 140x higher than the confirmed influenza samples. There's 280M confirmed, which turns into a CDC estimate of 39MM.

Out of only 1.3MM tested. So from all the cases that were suspected to be flu, and then tested for it, almost 80% were NOT the flu.