It appears to me the “slide rule math” is the seriously ill are an order of magnitude above the deaths and the asymptomatic are another two orders of magnitude above that.
It’s not the death rate.
Yes, 80% or so have a mild case.
Of the 20% who get really sick, about half that number is hospitalized. About half of them need ICU level care. Each ICU stay is 10-14 days, vs 3-5 for the normal flu.
The number of ICU days needed throughout the country will be about 1.4 million patient days. Every day, there are 92,000 ICU beds in the US. At 80% capacity, there is about 18,600 available or transitional beds. Hospitals are always full.
So, at a peak, there will be about ten patients (at least) lined up for each bed. And the available beds will probably not be where the need is.
Does that put it into a better perspective?
[[That’s been nagging at me too. When they talk about mortality rate, is the only denominator they are using based on CONFIRMED cases and not adding undetected ones?]]
Dont’ quote me on this- but i read years ago something about that but don’t quite remember it- I think what i remember is that they come up with ‘acceptable guesstimates based on statistics’ (ie something like there is always a % that will never go to docs no matter what- some that will but ignore doctor’s advice, won’t get tested, but show symptoms, etc- )- and remember there being a pretty large, but accepted leeway, due to variables- when making projections about something like this-
I Think a proper result should include a spread between known cases and unknown- so like it should read ‘known cases = 3%, while factoring in an accepted % of unknown cases might yield a final result of only .3%”
That would certainly clear things up and allow us to compare to other flues if they had the same spread system-
Your question would be a good one to ask an online doc about- if we could find one that isn’t swamped with work lol-