It is time for folks to figure this out for themselves.
The best petri dish we have to date is the Diamond Princess ship. It is on the “list of countries” here:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
712 passengers tested positive.
10 of them have died.
That is a mortality rate of 10/712 = 1.4%
That is the lowest possible number, because seven weeks later there are still 105 unresolved active cases, including 15 still classified as serious/critical.
This is with the very best medical care.
Don’t listen to anyone else—do your own number crunching.
Actually, two others from the DP died after being evacuated. One in the US and one in Canada. They were listed separately on the JHU site at one point. Total 12 dead, 103 unresolved.
What are the ages of those who died? I’ll be surprised if every single one of them doesn’t belong to the at-risk age group or have underlying conditions. I’ll also be surprised if all or most of those who haven’t died belong to the same age group but are healthier overall. I’m basing this on cruises I’ve taken and the makeup of the passengers.
Numbers tell us facts but numbers alone don’t tell us all the facts.
What you say is all true IF we do not overwhelm our health care system. If we do overwhelm it then you can throw all those stats out the window.
This is NOT a valid sample to extrapolate to the population at large. Cruise ship demographics are different: much older, much more health compromised (obesity/O2), and much more mobility compromised than the general population.
These are my observations from a lot of cruises over a couple of decades.
If you use Diamond Princess as a template, the observations skew to a much more deadly rate than will be seen in the US at large. If anything, I’m pleasantly surprised to see the Diamond Princess death rate is, thankfully, as low as it is.
God bless them.
At 1.4%, if 10 million people get infected, that’s 140,000 dead. If 60 million get infected, that’s 600,000 dead.
So, it’s not the flu.
I bet the average age is much higher. You need to factor that in.
105 still unresolved cases 7 weeks later out of 712.
A game with odds, I would prefer to not have to play.
130 out of 700 with bad outcomes.
Not even taking into account the unknown LONG TERM health of the other 582.
if you wanted the wanted a random test the Diamond Princess was not it....people were all mostly all very elderly...
At present, it is tempting to estimate the case fatality rate by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of confirmed cases. The resulting number, however, does not represent the true case fatality rate and might be off by orders of magnitude [...]
A precise estimate of the case fatality rate is therefore impossible at present.
2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV): estimating the case fatality rate – a word of caution - Battegay Manue et al., Swiss Med Wkly, February 7, 2020
The case fatality rate (CFR) represents the proportion of cases who eventually die from a disease.
Once an epidemic has ended, it is calculated with the formula: deaths / cases.
But while an epidemic is still ongoing, as it is the case with the current novel coronavirus outbreak, this formula is, at the very least, "naïve" and can be "misleading if, at the time of analysis, the outcome is unknown for a non negligible proportion of patients." [8]
(Methods for Estimating the Case Fatality Ratio for a Novel, Emerging Infectious Disease - Ghani et al, American Journal of Epidemiology)
In other words, current deaths belong to a total case figure of the past, not to the current case figure in which the outcome (recovery or death) of a proportion (the most recent cases) hasn't yet been determined.