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Comment by thepangolino | Hacker News Reader

I still would like to see the age repartition and most importantly a study on unreported cases.

From what I’ve heard, CIVID-19 has symptoms very similar to the flu.

The flu only has a 0.1-0.05% mortality rate. The early symptoms of of it are flu-like but the severe respiratory symptoms that set in and make it difficult to breath are not like your typical flu, to my knowledge.

They give a "cough" incidence of 70.8% and a acute respiratory distress syndrome incidence of 14.8% in their paper. Meaning even a lot of people diagnosed with the infection show no respiratory symptoms, let alone severe ones. I therefore wouldn't dismiss the possibility of a high number of unreported cases, where people didn't develop any major symptoms and thought it was a cold or flu if they noticed symptoms at all.

Since the common cold is caused by coronaviruses a decent chunk of the time, I'm not sure it's even inaccurate for someone with a non-severe case of covid-19 to conclude that they have a cold.

Maybe that's the tricky part that helps it spread. Having a cold isn't enough to stop most people from going out in public. In my experience among people I know in the US and Canada, having a mild cold isn't enough for people to stay home from work.

But while a covid-19 infection might really be just a cold to a large chunk of people who get it, it's unusually deadly to a non-trivial percentage of people as well.

the mortality rate of this is highly skewed because of shortage of test kits

are the flu stats verified like the ones for this infection? or is the flu estimated among the population with a rougher method? For now I bet that there are a lot of people positive that are not being tested, in Italy they discovered a patient 1 only because they were "luky", and began testing a lot of people finding many positive cases.

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