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.

[gawatchman]

I like the way you think and I need a drink as well after being duped over this hysteria.

[monkeyshine]

Where are you getting 38,000,000 infections? I don’t see that. I see ~420,000 infections and ~9,000 deaths worldwide. That’s 2.14% worldwide.

The CDC says 44,000 infections and 554 deaths but I think that is as of yesterday because the news is reporting ~700 deaths and ~60,000 cases confirmed in the US. Apx 1.2%.

I agree the death rate will drop as we find out more people are asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[nevermorelenore]

Like

red dye # ???

Metal drinking glasses in the 60’s

Red meat diet

[kabar]

A distinction without a difference. That is what rounding means and how it is done. The point is that people are comparing apples to oranges when comparing the mortality rates for the Wuhan virus versus the generic flu. They are being computed differently.

[beethovenfan]

I think it’s 6 %, not .06%.

[DennisR]

There are about 50 hospitals/medical centers in NYC. There are about 16,000 confirmed cases in NYC. If 10% (probably a high estimate) are serious enough for hospitalization, that equals 1600 hospitalizations; or an average of 32 per hospital. Seems manageable at this point.

[Trump Girl Kit Cat]

Don’t even try to tell Travis or Rummychick this they will beat you down until you succumb OMG!!!

[heartwood]

Over 21000 confirmed cases. That’s not counting the unconfirmed coming into the hospitals right now in respiratory distress.

[DennisR]

There is no reliable way to calculate the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for flu, because it is not a reportable disease. That is why the CDC can only estimate the number of illnesses and the number of deaths. To calculate a true CFR you must have confirmed/tested illnesses and then know the outcome of those illness (recovered or died).

Therefore, anyone who says something like “Covid-19 is 10x more lethal than the flu” cannot back up their statement with data. Dr. Fauci has said that, but I would really like to “see his work.”

[Thud]

Not. It also depends on how many people actually catch CV19. If 100 million Americans catch it and half of those show no symptoms and are never diagnosed with it, while a million die of it, that looks like a 2% death rate based on the diagnosed total, but is really only 1% if you count the likely 50 million who were never diagnosed because they never showed symptoms.

Now change the 100 million Americans to 200 million who catch it, but this time make the symptomless percentage 75% instead of 50%, while keeping the total number of known infected at 50 million and the total dead still at one million. The proportion of known infected to dead is still 2%. But the actual proportion of dead to total infected, both diagnosed with symptoms and undiagnosed without symptoms, goes down to 0.5% of the 200 million.

Either way one million die of CV19. Now tell the dead they should be happy because the death rate is lower if there are more Americans who got CV19 but never showed symptoms.

What counts is how many Americans will die or be crippled because of this d***ed Chinese Virus. We don't know because we don't know for sure what the proportion of asymptomatic to symptomatic victims is in America. We can't know unless close to the entire population of a statistically valid area is tested. That just won't happen in America because only people who volunteer can be tested.

Plus there is the detail that a really quick, as well as accurate, test for the Chinese Virus is required, and there aren't any yet. Only when such a test is widely available can we even think of determining what the ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic victims is, and then that will have to be done in some foreign country. Israel and South Korea come to mind.

Right now there is only ONE known instance in which a possibly statistically valid test of everyone in a given area was performed, and that was of all the passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Japan last month. There were 305 known victims when all the untested remainder were tested, and produced about another 400 asymptomatic victims. Since then some of the latter group have developed symptoms.

It seems safe to assume from the Diamond Princess example that there are probably at least as many asymptomatic victims of the Chinese Virus as there are victims who show symptoms. It might be more than that, but we won't know until there is both a really quick but accurate test, and it can be performed in a controlled experiment on a larger population sample. That is at least a month off, and perhaps two months off.

[tomkat]

Pardon me:

This whole world has gone insaner

Carry on   ;-)

[willk]

“35,000 die on the highways every year. We must shut down the highways.”

We practically have done just that. With the shutdowns we will probably have lower traffic fatalities, flu deaths etc. but more stress related deaths and suicides.

[Svartalfiar]

Right now the mortality rate of the Wutan virus uses the number of deaths divided by confirmed cases. There is no estimate of unreported or untreated cases of the virus. IMO the mortality rate should be well below the stated 1.3%.

Except there's no way to prove this, besides testing every single person, and their mother. There's only two countries that have actually tested a LOT of people: SKorea, and Bahrain. Enough to have likely discovered a large majority of those supposed 86% non-confirmed cases hidden in the general populace. They have each tested over 4M/1MM people, a test rate 55x higher than these US's. SKorea has a crazy surveillance mindset, to where they have one camera in public for every six people, if I remember correctly. No idea how Bahrain's surveillance state is. But they can contact trace and catch most of those people that get infected without ever knowing. So their numbers likely have pretty decent rates for the actual numbers, without having to rely on some Chinese study claiming 86% of people don't even know they're infected. (More on that below.)

Pulling data from Johns Hopkins, here is total cases, deaths, recoveries, current CFR, and best-case CFR (assume all current cases have 0 deaths and all recover). Bahrain has very few cases in total, so their numbers can be easily skewed in any direction. SKorea will be more accurate. I'm just adding Bahrain because they've done pretty extensive testing.

- SKorea: 9037 / 120 / 3507 / 3.31% / 1.33%
- Bahrain: 392 / 3 / 177 / 1.67% / 0.77%

So Right now we're looking at just over 3% fatalities in SKorea, with a minimum of 1.33%. Even if we give them 20% of cases going undiscovered, that still leaves their best-case CFR over 1% (1.06%).


As for the "86% of people go undiscovered" myth. I highly doubt 86% of cases are so mild they go undetected. It is very odd for any particular virus to have severe symptoms across a range of people, then have a bunch of people with... nothing. If you're taking that number from the Chinese study (the only place I've seen it come from), well that poses a couple problems. Mostly, it's out of China, so it really can't be trusted at face value no matter what. Secondly, their study oinly states that the rapid spread was due to infected people not being discovered to have the virus, NOT that all those people were perfectly healthy-appearing. Many of the Chinese infected/dead in the hospitals were never officially tested, so they were never included in China's official numbers. But certainly contributed to the viral spread. Also, lots of sick people were given diagnoses of 'pneumonia' or 'respiratory issue' or something (NOT Wuhan virus), to hide the case count within China.

[monkeyshine]

It is just statistics. If you have 100,000 flu diagnoses, and 100 of them die from flu-related complications, you can say with high confidence that the CFR for the flu is 0.1% across the population at large.

[Norseman]

It’s a pretty vague, and poorly written, article. Lots of speculation that just ends up concluding what we already knew: the deaths are known with certainty, but the number infected is not known, but is certainly larger than the number testing positive, perhaps much larger.

[BDParrish]

When people are talking or.posting about tbis, they often confuse the !legality rate with the case fatality rate. So which one are we on now?

[ALASKA]

NYC is going to be a nightmare.

[DennisR]

But you will never be sure how many flu diagnoses or deaths there are. It is not a reportable illness, so the CDC has no way of knowing either the number of diagnoses or deaths. At least with adults. If a child dies of the flu, that is reportable. So you will see the CDC stating something like, “There were 21,000 flu deaths during such-and-such a year. Of those deaths, 323 were children.”

[BDParrish]

Spell corrector problem.
I am trying to say that the mortality rate is not the same thing as the case fatality rate.
The IDEA equation is well known and used for all such epidemics. Must we reinvent the wheel?

[The_Media_never_lie]

Shutting down for the sniffles....what a nation of wusses.

---

Irresponsible, sensational media populated by ignorant, unscientific journalism school graduates. Partisan hackery at its worst, and uncaring about the havoc they cause.