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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

The point is that the fatality rate depends on the denominator chosen.

Choosing a denominator of only people with COVID who go on to develop pneumonia, results in a rate of 2%.

Choosing a denominator of all people with laboratory confirmed cases of COVID, results in a rate of 1.4%.

Clearly a denominator of “everyone who was infected with COVID” is larger than the denominator of “everyone with a laboratory confirmed case”.

The question is, how much larger? The number of reports of asymptomatic and mild cases which are asked not to go to a hospital are specific reasons why the true fatality rate is less than 1.4% and may be considerably less than 1%.

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The number of reports of asymptomatic and mild cases which are asked not to go to a hospital are specific reasons why the true fatality rate is less than 1.4% and may be considerably less than 1%

Total speculation. There is no reliable data on how many uncounted people there are. I've been watching your comments on here for days and it's clear you want this to be overblown, as we all do, but you're intentionally twisting the uncertainty in the evidence and data to try and downplay things. Things could turn out to be worse than we think, not better. Look at the death rates in Italy and Iran. Not to mention how high hospitalization rates could overwhelm our medical infrastructure and push the mortality rate even higher.

In short, unless you're a working expert in a relevant field, there's exactly zero reason to listen to you. I'll continue to listen to what health officials are saying, and watch what they're doing. And when I do that, it's pretty clear that you and others like you who claim this is overblown and no big deal are almost certainly wrong.

> I've been watching your comments on here for days and it's clear you want this to be overblown, as we all do, but you're intentionally twisting the uncertainty in the evidence and data to try and downplay things.

Agreed. There are a few users on here who are almost 'hysterically' downplaying things and it's fascinating. I imagine these are the types of people who would get busy rearranging deck chairs as the Titanic went down, so to speak.

> In short, unless you're a working expert in a relevant field

FYI, the italicized portion was a quote from the New England Journal of Medicine from a working expert in a relevant field.

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