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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> I really don't get why people get so worried about this. Especially on a science oriented forum like HN.

Because of the death rate.

We're basing what we know on China, but can we really trust their numbers? We'll soon have more reliable figures from Japan, Korea, and Italy.

Iran has reported a death rate of up to 17%.

Healthy people are dying too. Young people.

And if the medical system gets overwhelmed, those that develop pneumonia will be fucked.

(I'll chase down citations and edit my post to include them.)

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I'm extremely skeptical of a 17% case fatality rate (likely not death rate, which is different). That's almost certainly high due to under-reporting of cases. Iran's public health surveillance system is likely not as good as China, and they've not acted with the alacrity that the Chinese have.

But it doesn't have to be a 17% CFR rate to be a disaster. The Spanish Flu of 1918 just had around a 2-3% CFR, but it was easier to transmit than the common flu, so it spread quickly and lots of people died. Covid-19 appears to share the relatively high r0 of Spanish Flu. So there's ample reason to be concerned.

> Iran has reported a death rate of up to 17%.

Apparently Iran also had a high death rate for spanish flu.

From wikipedia:

> In Iran, the mortality was very high: according to an estimate, between 902,400 and 2,431,000, or 8% to 22% of the total population died.[67]

> -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

Iran was also at the tail end of 4-year, 3-sided war that killed around 2M people. The very fact that there's 1.5M people (!) leeway in the numbers tells you something about the state the country was in, and how difficult it is to attribute those deaths specifically to one thing like the flu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Campaign

2,900 deaths in a country of 1.39B. 2 deaths per million people.

If the same things happens in the US, that's 800 people dead in the US.

Almost 3,000 Americans die each month in traffic accidents.

Keep things in perspective.

2,900 deaths after shutting down the economy for a quarter or more.

2900 deaths in a few months, with more people getting sick every day. The process of viral expansion isn't linear...

> 2,900 deaths in a country of 1.39B. 2 deaths per million people.

1. You have no guarantee that it's not going to get worse.

2. And this was after a draconian quarantine, and nation-wide mobilization to prevent the spread.

How about 2,200 deaths in Wuhan of 10m people, only because it’s sealed off just in time so it’s not replicated in other cities across China?

There’s no reason to believe the Iranian number is anywhere near accurate. On the contrary, it’s likely that the cases confirmed number is too low everywhere except maybe the diamond princess. Quoting 17% as the possible death rate is just inciting panic. It’s likely much lower. Which is not to say you should not worry; I think it’ll reach most people and end up killing millions.

But what about selection bias? The mortality rate is an upper limit at the moment. Is it just wishful thinking that maybe in reality 100 times more people are infected but show no to very little symptoms? The number of people that can be tested is very limited, so only the cases are tested which are above a certain threshold in severity.

Every person infected on the Diamond Princess was identified (~800 people, older cohort than the general population), and 6 people have died so far, with optimal care. That's a strong indicator that it's much worse than the usual flu, though hardly Captain Trips.

Valid point! This is indeed already much higher, and only sets a lower bound. So we should keep an eye on this well controlled sample.

So we have a lower bound of somewhere around 1% and an upper bound of somewhere around 7% ( https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ ) at the moment. Not very reassuring.

I just finally read the The Stand a couple months ago. Not the best timing in retrospect. Also had just started playing Pandemic Legacy, but I had to stop when the cover image of the game started looking the same as the front page of the newspaper.

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