Hacker News Reader

Comment by monadic2 | Hacker News Reader

Why does this media make such a big deal about a virus with such a low mortality rate?

Yeah, it’s just more contagious than the flu, possibly has a mortality rate of 1-3% (20x - 50x higher than the flu), lands another 10-20% in the ICU, has infected tens of thousands of people already (likely many more), has overwhelmed medical infrastructure, and has prompted China to place 100 million people on lockdown and force their economy to grind to a halt to try and stop a global pandemic.

Yeah, it’s clearly nothing. What’s the big deal?

National mortality rate is 2.1% of confirmed cases.

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

What would you consider a high mortality rate? 2% lethality in healthy patients is significant and it is "so far". We don't know the true rate yet.

The swine flu of 2009 had up to a 5% mortality rate in confirmed cases (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/).

SARS was 10% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...)

MERS is 35% (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/clinical-features.html)

The bird flu is 60% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza), though there's few cases and estimates of what it would actually be are lower, but still >15% (https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555)

The denominator currently has a multi day head start vs the numerator. Exponential growth means the fraction will grow.

Not to mention limits of testing and reporting at this point. Regardless, we're not at a point where your method of comparison is meaningful yet.

If we want to err the other way, you could look at deaths over deaths+ recoveries:

638/(638+1341)=32.2%

That, combined with the growth/spread rate and the fact that otherwise healthy 30-somethings are dying, means a potentially nasty outbreak. And that's based on taking the Chinese government at their word.

True. ...but the difference is that millions of people might contract this illness - unlike the other ones you mentioned.

What threshold of mortality rate do you think should justify media coverage?

It’s not the media coverage itself I am concerned with, it’s the lack of historical context with which the reporting is presented. What impression does it leave if it is presented as simply a communicable disease coming from china?

We don't know the mortality rate yet. Most of the confirmed cases are too recent for the illness to have killed the patients, so expressing the mortality rate as (deaths / confirmed cases) is incorrect.

We are also not sure how many people are dying as a result of complications caused by this illness. The current reported death rate is based on people killed as a direct result of the illness.

mortality rate is consider low compare to other major outbreak but it's infectious rate is the highest so far.

> its infectious rate

Do you have numbers or a source for that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com