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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Those who died from the virus aren’t writing in to tell us it’s very bad, so there’s that.

Edit: To be clear, I’m not being dismissive of this patient’s experience; just want to point out the element of survivorship bias.

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I think this mans perspective is important. For the vast majority of people who get this it isn’t much different then having a cold or the flu. The large majority of people this is killing are elderly, whose immune systems are less likely to successfully defend.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

But that is not the picture painted by media day in and day out. There is so much hype and sensationalism with this story. They would have us believe it’s the zombie apocalypse out there, and I just don’t think that is the reality.

The media mostly ignored this story for 1 entire month despite its constant seriousness and despite it being clear that it was the biggest event of the year so far. Only this last week has it picked up on it. For people who have been following it from the start that fact was used as evidence that it was an actually serious problem given that the media was constantly downplaying it or just ignoring it.

In regards to the disease's lethality, even though most people will experience it as just a flu, between 10% to 15% of people experience it bad enough that they need hospital beds. If there's a generalized outbreak in the population like there was in China hospitals will be overloaded and general chaos will ensue, because hospitals in most countries aren't ready to deal with this kind of surge.

The media has been reporting on every detail of the coronavirus for over a month now. If you have only just started noticing, that is your fault. No one is ignoring anything.

Just to point out that this was already being well reported at least a month ago [0], and that at that point people on HN were projecting millions of deaths by yesterday [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167157 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167881

So, my son had a really bad cold that resulted in an infected lymph node and a course of antibiotics. They never ran a test for covid-19.

So, how do we know that we have anywhere close to the right number of total patients?

Do you have any citations for these high numbers? Some statistical skepticism is important in matters of public concern.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.18.20024539v... This is a paper that looks at 50k Chinese patients and 18.1% of them are considered "severe cases", which China has been using to mean needing special care in the hospital.

And based on a WHO official's statements they found no evidence that there was a big number of unreported cases in China. https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/25/new-data-from-china-butt..., https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell/status/123233479099875328.... Which would mean that these numbers coming out of there are likely more correct than wrong.

From your second link:

"“What [the data] support is that sure, there may be a few asymptomatic cases … but there’s probably not huge transmission beyond what you can actually see clinically,” Aylward said.

The claim was quickly challenged by an infectious diseases expert who serves on a committee that advises the WHO’s health emergencies program."

It's got a 2% fatality rate. It's going to overload medical facilities in many major cities, is already leading to medicine shortages for meds from China, and will close jobs and schools around the nation. It's not smallpox or anything, but it is major.

All mentions of fatality rate are accompanied by caveats that it may be much lower. I predict there are >10x more cases in China than currently reported, especially if it is really so infectious.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

2% seems to be the max rate, and it's coming down as we identify more people that have the virus, but are not even sick enough to go to the hospital.

I loved my grandparents, so I'm not downplaying this -- but the mortality rate for healthy people under 60 is much lower.

Okay, now that people are treating this worldometers.info page as gospel, some clarification is in order.

The fatality stats from that page is entirely from Table 1 of this paper, http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9..., analyzing 44,672 confirmed cases (including 1023 deaths) in China as of Feb 11. Apparently at that point most non-death cases haven’t been cured yet, but some of those people have died since, which would push the fatality rates up. Just compare the daily reported stats:

- Feb 11, 44,653 confirmed, 8204 severe (ongoing), 4740 cured, 1113 dead (I guess deaths data were lagging by a day in that paper);[1]

- Feb 28, 79,251 confirmed, 7664 severe (ongoing), 39002 cured, 2727 dead.[2]

Also, it is possible (in my layman’s opinion) that older people succumb to the virus faster, while some young people struggle for a long time before dying.

[1] http://www.nhc.gov.cn/yjb/s7860/202002/395f075a5f3a411f80335...

[2] http://www.nhc.gov.cn/yjb/s7860/202002/4ef8b5221b4d4740bda31...

Edit: Actually the worldometers page also lists some stats from another paper, but the point stands.

The message is clear to me: don't panic. And it is a good one, even if things were (or are) worse than this experience, panic won't help.

It's already been stated that for those it doesn't kill, this strain of coronavirus produces a rather mild flu.

The containment activity isn't intended to soothe the people who carry the virus symptom-free or with mild flu symptoms. It is to lower the mortality rate in the overall population due to the higher-than-typical death rate associated with the strain.

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