Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by ValentineC | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

ValentineC·

According to the latest WHO sitrep [1], there are 3 deaths and 924 confirmed cases. That's a fatality rate of 0.325%.

China is an outlier because their health system is overworked.

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

View on HN

If this gets to where most of the people in the world are, ie: India/Bangladesh/Pakistan/Africa, do you think their health care system will be better than China currently or worse?

Wouldn't all health care systems be overworked with this high of an infection rate?

LOTS of countries don't have a health system as advanced as China, this is where the risk is. You can't dismiss the risk based on the fact that China is overworked because it is likely that other countries could end up in that situation with sufficient amount of cases.

Dividing current deaths by current cases is just about the worst way of estimating CFR of a developing epidemic. Try current deaths vs cases from 5, 7, 10 days ago or deaths vs (deaths + recoveries).

8 out of 1073 = 1.34125% as of 20.02.2019 [1], looks like it rises 1% per day;p but we both know that it's false assumption. And numbers we have right now doesn't matter really because it is too early to tell. Half of the world doesn't even have a capacity to test for COVID-19. And impact on developing countries will be on completely different level [2] (or maybe not, because population is much younger there)

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... [2] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...

The death rate doesn't mean anything unless we are looking at the "infected and recovered" number... so the death rate should only go up from there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com