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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.

By about 3-4 orders of magnitude, it is. The flu tends to kill about 60K people annually and most of those are old or very young or already had a compromised immune system. This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%. If left unchecked it would overwhelm available health care capacity pretty quickly.

The Chinese mis-handled this. But it would be a mistake to think that the west is super prepared for something like this compared to China. ICU capacity is limited, test capacity is limited. Our advantages are mostly in more transparent messaging and wealth. Those two will have a big impact on the economic and health care aspects but it may not be enough to drop this down to the level of yet another flu.

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A flu pandemic, in official terminology, is a different and more severe thing than the seasonal flu. The government regularly plans for such outbreaks and isn't afraid to spend a billion dollars when needed; for example, about 5 years ago they preemptively struck against bird flu by obliterating poultry farms at government expense. (And that one didn't even affect humans!)

I don't think you're getting your numbers from an accurate source either. The flu kills a lot more than 6k people by every estimate I've seen.

Sorry, dropped a '0' there. My bad. Edited.

Also, 'pandemic' is just about the geographic spread, not about the mortality or the rate of infection.

Normally, yes, but the seasonal flu is excluded from the definition so we don't have to say that there's an annual recurring pandemic. When agencies talk about flu pandemic preparations, they're referring to an outbreak so severe that it no longer counts as just the seasonal flu.

Right. But COVID-19 isn't influenza related so all these flu comparisons are moot as far as I'm concerned. The mortality appears for now - with all the figures that I've seen - to be much higher.

If this thing keeps going like it has for the last couple of weeks then it will make the last H1N1 pandemic look like a walk in the park. The final count on that was 100's of thousands dead in 199 different countries. And it didn't take off nearly as fast as this.

But new pathogens always look much worse than they are because we haven't got testing sorted out yet. We test the very serious cases, we don't test the mild cases.

Yes, that's a good point. Especially valid because there is a very real limit on the number of test kits available. That's also a risk in case of asymptomatic spreading.

> This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%.

There's still a lot of uncertainty around the fatality rate here. For cases outside China, the fatality rate so far is about .2%, compared to about .1% for seasonal influenza. By contrast, in Hubei the reported fatality rate is around 4-5%. (Numbers are as of last week so might be slightly outdated now).

My guess is that the 2-3% estimate is too high. In Hubei there is probably a reporting bias towards counting the more sick cases -- mild or asymptomatic COVID cases are probably being reported less often.

> My guess is that the 2-3% estimate is too high.

I sincerely hope you are right. Those are numbers that when extrapolated to global scale are too horrific to even contemplate.

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