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Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a mortality rate of 2.3% is a lot more than 23x higher than the flu, which the CDC says has a mortality rate of 2 per 100,000.

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It can be confusing to compare the mortality rate of cases in hospitals (which are be definition the worst cases) to the mortality rate of all infections (many of which never get to hospitals or get officially diagnosed). Gotta make sure we compare apples to apples.

From https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.20021675v... it has a case fatality rate of 4.45% for men and 1.25% for women. CFR increases when people don't get treatment for severe complications.

According to the WHO the case fatality rate is 2.3%. However the CFR is not the real mortality rate of the disease and is a changing number. Here’s an excerpt from the latest Situation Report about the CFR and what it means.

“The confirmed case fatality ratio, or CFR, is the total number of deaths divided by the total number of confirmed cases at one point in time. Within China, the confirmed CFR, as reported by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention,9 is 2.3%. This is based on 1023 deaths amongst 44 415 laboratory-confirmed cases as of 11 February. This CFR does not include the number of more mild infections that may be missed from current surveillance, which has largely focused on patients with pneumonia requiring hospitalization; nor does it account for the fact that recently confirmed cases may yet develop severe disease, and some may die. As the outbreak continues, the confirmed CFR may change. Outside of China, CFR estimates among confirmed cases reported is lower than reported from within China. However, it is too early to draw conclusions as to whether there are real differences in the CFR inside and outside of China, as final outcome data (that is, who will recover and who will die) for the majority of cases reported from outside China are not yet known.”

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

They are defining the term "confirmed case fatality ratio" as something different from the CFR that cannot be directly compared. The way they say it is misleading because people will parse it like: "{confirmed case fatality ratio}, or CFR", but they're actually saying "confirmed {case fatality ratio, or CFR}". You can tell because CFR doesn't have enough letters to have "confirmed" in it, and it usually has a different definition. That's also why they never call it "the CFR", they call their thing "this CFR" or "the confirmed CFR".

Their confirmed CFR is not a good measure of anything because the conversion rate to CFR depends on average time between case confirmation and death. It effectively assumes that everyone diagnosed but alive will recover.

Many people are pointing out that the 2.3% rate is just the case fatality rate (so known cases) -- probably the most cited source right now for infection fatality rate (which makes corrections for unreported cases) is this: https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an...

The current estimate is 0.94 (0.37, 2.9).

The trick to no infections is not testing. Poland is still clear of infections, in other news Poland has no working tests to use on suspected patients/dead.

I think that's the yearly death rate for the whole population. 300m / 100k * 2 = 6k flu deaths in the US per year. Seems like that could be true.

That seems rather low.

"According to CDC, this year's flu season has led to at least 12 million medical visits and 250,000 hospitalizations. In addition, CDC found that the percentage of outpatient visits for influenza-like illness increased to 6.8% in the week ending Feb. 8, up from 6.6% in the week ending Feb. 1. The national baseline for those visits is 2.4%. Between 14,000 and 36,000 flu-related deaths overall occurred from Oct. 1, 2019, to Feb. 8, CDC estimated."

The season is far from over.

I’m wondering if some of the rise in deaths and hospitalizations were actually due to the (as yet undetected) virus.

You are comparing people who have caught COVID-19, to per head of population, many of who won't catch the flu.

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