Coronavirus Death Toll Rises to 805, Passing SARS | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus Death Toll Rises to 805, Passing SARS

bloomberg.com

68 pointsminkeymaniac83 comments

I have serious doubt on the death count.

According to the numbers I got from https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm now:

Death rate in Hubei province is 780/27100 = 2.88%

Death rate in all the other provinces combined is 32/10127 = 0.32%

So the death rate in Hubei is 9 times of other provinces. Is this really possible? ZheJiang province has 1075 confirmed cases now, but still 0 death count. Seriously? Hong Kong only has 26 confirmed cases, but already has 1 death count.

For SARS, China has a 6.6%, much lower than other countries. For example, Hong Kong has a death rate of 17%. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... )

Do international researchers use China's officially reported count in their modeling?

Just wanted to call out that I think calculating death rate as "deaths / infections" works for past infections but is wildly inaccurate today because the majority of infections have no resolution yet.

I'd say "deaths / recoveries" or maybe "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" is probably better, with the caveat that it is likely much higher than the final number it's going to settle at as more people recover.

I've been using recovery numbers from https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... .

Great work. But I don't see "deaths / recoveries" or "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" on your webpage.

That's because most reputable sources don't have enough information to make a reasonable estimate of the case fatality rate. The JHU map only shows raw numbers.

If you're using deaths as a proportion of known outcomes, Hubei has come down to about 35%. Other provinces are reporting, at most, six deaths. I don't believe the numbers coming from China for one bit. Yes, Hubei is overwhelmed, but it really wouldn't take much to overwhelm most health care networks (in- or outside China).

Dutch wire service BNO News is reporting that a Japanese national who died in Wuhan was believed to be infected with the coronavirus but not included in the official coronavirus death count.

> Death rate in Hubei province is 780/27100 = 2.88% > Death rate in all the other provinces combined is 32/10127 = 0.32%

Please remember that the number of people to the right in your formula are not all recovered. They could still die. So the chances of dying from the virus _could_ be higher than the %s you have calculated.

> So the death rate in Hubei is 9 times of other provinces. Is this really possible?

The numbers suggest as much.

While I share your skepticism of the Chinese reported numbers - remember that the Hubei province is the epicenter and is currently locked down. It is resource strained. So I expect the rate of death there to be higher than elsewhere.

I also expect the Zhejiang numbers to trend in the other direction, as they have just announced it will be locked down too.

I agree that Hubei province is the epicenter so we would expect higher death rate. But don't know whether 9 times high is reasonable.

Also, the same reasoning would conclude that China's death count in SARS in definitely fake.

It's just impossible to have real life accurate numbers. The H1N1 pandemic had the original numbers revised to 10x higher

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/somethings-right-here-folks-l...

Or what kills people is the health care system being overwhelmed, lack of respirator, supplies, monitors, care. Which is in fact the biggest risk and why closing Wuhan was probably the right move... at a huge cost to the people there - it delays and staggers new infections and allows time to shore up resources.

I content that there is probably no healthcare system on the planet that could handle a sudden emergence of a new virus with R0 2-4 and weak initial symptoms meeting a population with zero preexisting immunity out of nowhere.

A bad flu or dengue season regularly puts beds into hospital corridors in many countries, even very advanced ones like Singapore. In fact, this year's flu season was vicious and is still ongoing.

So capacity, which is an almost static constant from many individual factors (people+consumables+space+tools)hard to scale (few countries can create new hospitals in 10 days) to keep serious cases alive become saturated at which point many additional critical cases become casualties.

There is probably delays and even some lies in the numbers, but a vastly increased casualty rate in a city out of treatment capacity is entirely believable of the rest of the country is not in a crunch (other provinces do not seem to have overwhelmed hospitals yet - the great firewall is not nearly sealed enough to hide such things)

It takes 3-4 weeks for most peoples immune systems to either beat the virus or loose to it. Many of the deaths that are happening now are of people infected earlier. Once countries outside china start showing how many people were cured we will find out how deathly the disease is. Another problem is that Wuhan doesn't have enough facilities for all the seriously infected other cities healthcare have not been overwhelmed and hopefully wont be because of the quarantine systems implemented. I read somewhere the current number of people sick enough to be an ICU in wuhan is currently 2500~3000 but I cant find that Chinese website again.

China has had a long history of local government, or local organizations hiding bad news from the central government. I'm not sure things have changed.

Maybe its cultural. Until all the old people with the old baggage die the population's behaviour doesn't change. I'm in singapore and last night i went to a few supermarkets. Toilet paper, instant noodles, bread, thermometers..are some of the things that are sold out. Singapore has 40 cases and people are reacting like its the zombie apocalypse despite the government saying there will be no "lock down" and supplies will be sufficient.. As many here have pointed out. Singapore is a police state. This is where contact tracing is going to work if ever. And singapore was the first country to deny entry to travellers from china, despite the economy's dependency on china. I mean. Why toilet paper? It comes from Indonesia right?

There's adverts on tv every couple of hours and posters everywhere telling people not to wear face masks if they're not feeling unwell. Government and employers are handing out face masks. Yet theyre all sold out everywhere.

Government has to slow down if not stop that kind of over reaction. Or worse. Sinophobia?

I'm not sure anybody wanted to be "that guy" who defy "that rule" and gets incarcerated or branded as "Liar" like those 8 other whistle blower doctors... history can always be nicely rewritten since ancient times in China

And the central government has a long history of blaming its incompetence on the local governments

I contend the actual death rate should be :

Deaths / ( deaths + recoveries )

Everything else is “in progress”, without a defined conclusion.

That would be (based on today’s numbers):

813 / ( 813 + 2,669 )

Which equals 23% (truncated).

I believe this to be more indicative of the potential threat of the virus, especially in the early stages. Well, at least it puts an upper bound on it.

OK. I just used the Deaths / ( deaths + recoveries ) formula:

Hubei province: 780/2219 = 35.1%

Other provinces combined: 32/1256 = 2.5%

So Hubei has 14 times of death rate as other provinces combined.

Resource constraints play a major factor in the death rate. People who are in critical condition with the virus can be saved in an ICU by being placed on artificial respiration.

In Hubei, the epicentre, there is an extreme shortage of hospital beds. Most people are sent away, even with severe symptoms. This is why the death rate is higher.

That may very well be possible. Keep calculating it each day and see how the graph of it looks.

You’re definitely onto something interesting here.

Chinese meds might be of similar quality to Chinese ebay batteries, or Chinese melamine milk.

Edit: After watching over twenty videos from Chinese temporary "hospitals" on Wechat I now understand whats going on - there are NO meds at all. They isolate people and feed them once per day thru small holes in the wall.

death rate in China ex-hubei: 0.3 percent.

Death rate outside of China: 0.3 percent.

What is being under counted is the number of infected in Hubei, not the number of deaths in China ex-Hubei

The death count outside of China is only 1. The 0.3 percent outside of China is not a robust number.

What if the death count were 0? Would it be even less robust?

People are modeling the disease and thinking it will peak in a few weeks. I wonder how accurate such a model is if you have no idea how many people actually have the disease but have not been counted. The number of clusters of people with the virus are expanding (like the ski chalet in France). Could they create new expansions we aren't able to know yet?

It looks like the course of disease progression could be unpredictable, with patients who intially seemed to not have too harsh a case of the disease taking sudden turns for the worse after days or even a week of mild symptoms. 10% of patients having abnormal initial symptoms would also make control of the disease a lot harder if 10% of people escape your screens.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-patien...

Honestly, given the precedent—China lied to the WHO about SARS (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars )—I am baffled the WHO isn't sending a commission to monitor deaths at hospitals or how many bodies they burn at crematoriums.

There are unverified anonymous reports that 2 crematoriums alone are burning 2-4x more deaths than officially reported in the whole country, and a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital.

Unless you have a commission with feet on the ground, you can't verify or trust what China is reporting.

>a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital.

I believe you mean this:

https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342

Discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_wo...

I would take it with a grain of salt but I agree that we should have little trust into the official reports from China, their track record is pretty bad and the government control over all news and discussions end up generating wild theories that basically can't be entirely proven or disproven.

The death of Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower doctor and subsequent censoring of online discussions about the way he was treated by the authorities are also not helping:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-...

It's the 9th in China, right? Someone on Reddit¹ has accurately predicted what China will report 4 days ago, following a quadratic.

¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_...

A mission of WHO representatives has finally been approved.

"...Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said a team of international experts has been assembled, with the goal of sending the first members of the team to China by early next week. He said he is hoping officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be part of the mission." https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/804130735/whos-tedros-china-h...

The WHO and CDC have been trying to send people for weeks, and China has been refusing. Only today did they finally agree to let a committee from the WHO come to the country.

China was refusing a great deal of outside help and input until very recently.

I’m still wondering if the Mobile World Congress will get canceled because of this. 5 companies pulled out already. Gsma minimizes the impact and consequences, but think about this: what if one single person is found positive? How would they manage the quarantine of the tens of thousand of attendees? If you were Barcelona’s mayor what would you do? Prioritize public safety and risking the bankruptcy of the event organizers, or let everything happen risking a health crisis? Hard decisions...

Risk of getting coronavirus is the reason I decided not to attend MWC after having registered and made all arrangements. I have family that will not survive an infection if I end up being infected.

I was trying to rationalize that maybe it is not that risky but then I saw there are several companies attending that have "Wuhan" in the name, e.g. Wuhan Silicon Technologies Inc. Even if those were banned, there are dozens (hundreds?) of companies from China attending.

Personally I decided it is too risky for my situation, but that's not to say others shouldn't go. I just worry about getting 300,000 people in a venue for 3 days. Sounds super risky.

I might actually work from home for 2 weeks after my colleagues come back from the conference just to be safe.

In my view there's little upside to attending MWC this year for most large companies. They can publicize their new products just about as well by sending devices to reviewers and making cool videos, so there's very limited upside. And the downside is immense.

Travel does a number on the immune system. Plus, if they're anything like me, people who travel to MWC for work will tend to get short-changed on sleep.

That said, I don't think it really hurts the industry as a whole if MWC is cancelled, in the long term. But it may hurt MWC.

Last year at MWC I slept 8 full hours. Over 5 days. It’s the forced networking after running around all day that really gets you... I hardly remember a year that I didn’t get back with a cold, a hurt back, a sore throat and so on. Why do we still do this to ourselves? I will absolutely cheer the first company that organizes the first streaming only event. Just get the products in the hand of reviewers a day or two before... What we don’t consider though is that mwc is also basically a place where salespersons and clients sit down to sign contracts. Not sure what it means for them if it gets canceled

Official death toll. Part of me, and a growing number of people online, bet it's in the thousands, and it's being swept under the rug.

Or you are simply fantasizing about it being true.

Not exactly a generous interpretation.

It's no fantasy to say that China may be lying about the death toll. They lied about SARS deaths, they lied about deaths in Tiananmen Square....anyone who has familiarity with the third world knows that third world governments tend to lie about deaths they caused or could have prevented.

It's not a fantasy, but it's also not entirely malicious here.

I can't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it would list both reasons as the cause of death.

It is theorized that many doctors are listing the cause of death as pneumonia and not coronavirus because of this. It is similarly possible that some people die faster than they are able to be tested (the current test takes about 9 hours to complete).

Regardless, it would be foolish to believe this as the golden "actual" number, even ignoring the CCP's (and frankly, other countries') vested interest in fudging these numbers. It would be unlikely that it counts deaths from before the medical community recognized this virus, deaths that have occurred before test results have been returned, and deaths that have occurred outside of the healthcare system (i.e. in quarantined apartments, households, remote villages, or secretive military bases).

This is one source of that being standard procedure for the flu, from an individual which has been reporting about China in his YouTube channel for years, having lived there:

“... but I asked my wife, because she’s a Chinese doctor, I asked her, why is it that China only reports [say] 43 or 53 deaths a year from flu, but in the rest of the world we see these massive numbers, like in America 50K-80K a year? And well, she explained to me very simply: when somebody goes to the hospital in China with a complication, let’s say heart disease, or pneumonia, or you know, any other ailment, and then contracts the flu which then exacerbates that ailment and eventually leads to death, on the death certificate they’ll write down the cause of death as: heart disease, or pneumonia, or whatever that preexisting condition was, not as death from the flu. However in countries like America, if somebody goes and they have a preexisting condition but they die due to complications brought on by the flu, on their death certificate would be written «death due to complications brought on due to influenza», and so it’s marked down as a death caused by flu.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=4m12s

BTW, that’s the same video I mentioned in another discussion three days ago: “China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254414

This has also led to the in-joke, "it's impossible to die of the flu in China."

I don't fantasize about the death of people sorry.

Possibly, but wouldn’t it be nice to be proven wrong in that case?

Just curious, how does it compare to H1N1 currently? Think it will be more or less contained?

short answer is we have to wait for "28 days later", the long answer is... complicated, please take this with a grain of salt

the first tide of WARS(nCoV) "Contagion" have either become ill(hospitalized and quarantined) or dead, so now we're waiting to see if the number of cases outside of China still climbs as a local transmission epidemic

If this tide continues, international country like eg Singapore can super-spread this into global pandemic like H1N1 unless we close off borders and ban all flights/shippings economics/travels...

How viable is such containment actually remains to be seen, lets pray for the best

New cases seem to be going down https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/

The error bars around the numbers must be enormous. It is difficult to see how - physically speaking - they can accurately track the real numbers on the ground.

The timing seems to coincide interestingly with some companies and industries returning to work on Monday.

There is some speculation that that is because they are at their limit for how many tests they can do per day.

The test may also return a false negative. There is a case that a patient is identified after 4 tests.

https://www.worldofbuzz.com/wuhan-patient-tests-negative-4-t...

It would be flat in that case.

GP means if their processing limit is 3k tests per day, then at most they can report 3k new confirmed cases per day. And that's pretty much what we've seen since Jan 31: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...

That's assuming supply of testing kits is constant.

Which is a different constraint to the one in the message I was replying to.

Not just that, the hospitals are completely jammed in certain areas which means if you get the illness it's often safer to just stay at home - but then it goes unreported.

https://archive.md/7Ca9m

What's the R0 value?

Estimated between 2.1 and 3.7, if I'm remembering correctly.

somewhere between 2.2~(3 | 4 ?), one thing though, unlike SARS, WARS(nCoV) is already contagious during incubation period(14 days) and even before any symptoms cough/fever shows up, this SUPER complicates any measure to quarantine it

Just a heads-up, the WHO discourages geographic labels for diseases. Those labels may be totally orthogonal to the disease itself (as is the case with Spanish Flu), they punish localities for outbreak of (or association with) disease, and the fear of stigma could impact local officials' decisions about reporting outbreaks and seeking help from disease experts.

https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-d...

I’ll stop calling this WARS when they stop saying MERS.

Not to downplay the impact of the Coronavirus or it’s victims, but here is a bit of context:

In roughly the same timeframe in the US, influenza and pneumonia has killed roughly 10,000 people, and has a mortality rate of 7.1%. The epidemic level starts at 7.2%

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1300-people-died-flu-year/stor...

About 0.05% of people who caught the flu in the US died this season[0].

The 7.1% number you quote is total mortality of the flu and pneumonia combined. Pneumonia is often the cause of death for patients that are very sick with something else. For example, 40-60% of patients with traumatic brain injury get pneumonia.

The number you want is case fatality rate (CFR) which is 0.5%. The current tentative estimates for the Corona virus is 2-3%. For comparison, SARS was 9%.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-the-new-...

They don't have a mortality rate of 7.1%, that would imply that only 140,000 people got the flu or pneumonia. "7.1% of the deaths occurring during the week ending January 25, 2020 (week 4) were due to P&I". Of all the people that died, 7.1% of them died of flu or pneumonia, and many of them likely had other things going wrong. 10,000 people dying is a lot, but consider that tens of millions of people get sick. As opposed to tens of thousands getting sick and hundreds dying, which is a big difference in mortality.

Influenza isn't killing healthy people. It mostly kills old or new horns.

Influenza isn't killing healthy people. It mostly kills old or new horns.

That depends entirely on the strain of flu. The Influenza A H1N1 behind the 2009 pandemic primarily killed people between 18-64 years old.

https://watermark.silverchair.com/ciq012.pdf?token=AQECAHi20...

So is the Coronavirus.

no. for this one, no reported infections in children 15yo or younger.

It absolutely has infected children, as young as 36 hours old. There hasn't, however, been any reports of children dying.

technically you are probably correct though I was more replying to the parent's statement that it kills newborns

>The outbreak was first reported on December 31, but no children younger than 15 years old had been diagnosed as of January 22. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine said at the time that "children might be less likely to become infected or, if infected, may show milder symptoms" than adults.

>Since then, doctors have recorded a few one-off cases among children: a 9-month-old girl in Beijing, a child in Germany whose father was diagnosed with the virus first, and a child in Shenzhen, China, who was infected but displayed no symptoms.

>On Wednesday, Chinese authorities confirmed that an infant in Wuhan, China, had tested positive for the virus 30 hours after being born; the baby's mother is a coronavirus patient.

https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-are-puzzled-over-why-so...

From what I have seen, the daily death toll is doubling every 5 days or so.

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

I don’t know how long that can continue but at that rate it won’t be more than a couple of months before thousands are dying per day...

Edit: since it takes 2 to 3 weeks to die from it, we really should be comparing the deaths now to the cases two weeks ago, which gives a much much higher mortality rate than is currently reported — maybe as high as 20%

Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people dying per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3 days.

> Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people dying per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3 days.

To put that into perspective: About 700 people die in traffic accidents in China every single day.

So that'd be a point where it would (slowly) become a factor in mortality rates if it wasn't checked within 2020.

Wikipedia says about a few hundred thousand people globally die in a typical flu season that barely gets a mention in the news. That's perhaps the more topical comparison?

Oh, and that doesn't include the people who die of the common cold--which is caused by a variety of viruses, the only common thing about them being our immune system's similar reaction. Rhinovirus are the most common, but also coronavirus.

Wikipedia says about a few hundred thousand people globally die in a typical flu season that barely gets a mention in the news. That's perhaps the more topical comparison?

Significantly more people catch a flu virus than this coronavirus. So far this flu season the CDC is reporting a CFR of about 0.5% in the US (19 million cases, 10,000 deaths). If the Wuhan coronavirus were equally fatal that would equate to roughly 190 deaths worldwide so far. If the flu were as lethal as the conservative estimates for the Wuhan coronavirus we'd have on the order of 400,000 deaths in the United States alone. That's why people are talking about this coronavirus and largely blasé about the flu.

Additionally the flu typically only kills older or immunocompromised folks. When the flu starts killing healthy adults like H1N1 did in 2009 that tends to get a lot more attention.

> That's why people are talking about this coronavirus and largely blasé about the flu

I disagree. People are talking about coronavirus because the media is talking about it, because it makes great headlines out of context.

In January 2018, influenza and pneumonia in the USA had a CFR of 10.8%. That's horrific, but didn't earn media attention. Over 500,000 people die globally from influenza-related respiratory problems every year.

Break out of the 24/7 news cycle.

Over 500,000 people die globally from influenza-related respiratory problems every year.

And how many people need to be infected to achieve that result? More people than the Wuhan coronavirus would need. Try an order of magnitude more. That's why the flu typically doesn't make the news and this coronavirus does.

I don't know where you are, but in California the 2017-18 flu season was indeed heavily covered.

You are off by an order of magnitude I think. 10000 deaths over 19000000 cases is a mortality of 0.05%

Yeah I missed a zero. It's funny to think how mild the flu is and how many people it kills. Even a 1-2% case fatality rate for the Wuhan virus is a huge jump in dead bodies.

If coronavirus spreads as far as a typical flu, you’re talking about million or tens of millions dying and maybe hundreds of millions hospitalized.

Yes. The coronavirus is as of now poorly optimized, it's still fairly new. Give it a few generations of mutations, and it'll infect better but kill fewer.

The rate of traffic accident deaths isn’t doubling every week. A week after it’s 300 a day, it’ll be 600 a day, then 1200. In 2-3 months, you’re talking 10,000 a day.

According to the site you linked to, the daily deaths growth factor is trending downwards.

I'd argue that there is absolutely no "trend" whatsoever. It's just that some people are dying from it, and that's what happens to some people when they get a virus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com