15%-25% have severe symptoms. 5%+ critical. Of the first 100 cohorts in Wuhan with critical symptoms, 49 died (2.5% mortality rate). Patient-1 in Italy is a 38-year-old marathon runner. He is unconscious, intubated, and fighting for life. Doctors say they need "luck".
Doctors and nurses are dying from this. They did not die from treating patients with the garden variety flu. Conservative estimates put the mortality rate at 2.3%, with only room to grow as people die years later.
If you have severe symptoms, but are send home to self-quarantine, because the hospitals are over capacity, death rate is estimated at 80%-85%.
The more important factor is the hospitalization rate. If enough people become sick and hospitals become overloaded with patients they cannot treat to recovery faster than the virus spreads, there would be no choice but to send them elsewhere and the mortality rate would drastically increase. There are only so many professional medical staff but the virus has no limits on the amount of people it can spread to, and it sounds like the amount of continually attended medical care necessary for complete recovery is substantial.
Combine that with the fact that licensed virologists are giving estimates of 40-70% of the global population becoming infected, and I'm beginning to question why nobody in my immediate circle is taking this as an imminent and serious threat to their health.
I think that there is also huge amount misinformation circulating initiated by the people who should know better (especially should know better when to not give wrong answer then they actually have no idea).
- Fully educate the general public on the seriousness of COVID-19 and their role in preventing its spread;
For the public:
- Recognize that COVID-19 is a new and concerning disease, but that outbreaks can managed with the right response and that the vast majority of infected people will recover;
So the WHO tells you it's serious and concerning. Not that it is as severe as the common flu. Did we see proper management of outbreaks in the West? Well...
> "The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect with the C.D.C.," said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University.
About hoarding canned foods:
> We're asking folks in every sector, as well as people within their families, to start planning for this, because as we've seen from the recent countries that have had community spread, when it hit in those countries, it has moved quite rapidly
> Dr. Theresa Tam: Prepare ... Some of those steps include stocking up on needed prescriptions ahead of time so there is no need to do so during a possible pandemic. She also recommended people stock up on non-perishable food.
Both Canada and US CDC have told people to prepare, including stocking up on non-perishable food. What's the worst thing that could happen when this turns out to be a tempest in a teacup? You eat from your pantry the next few months, or you donate it to a homeless shelter. What's the worst thing that could happen, when you don't prepare, and this turns into quarantine-levels bad? You'll have to live with the guilt of ridiculing people for preparing for one. The other bad things are unspeakable.
The data you gather may not bear out the panic, but can you think of a reason for that, something to do with social order and public policy in light of a global pandemic?
CFR is not everything, you may survive the first round, with neurological damage, bone damage, lung damage, testicular damage, heart damage, psychological damage, and kidney damage.
> it’s by no means the apocalypse
This may be how you cope, but you can't say this for sure. There is a proper chance at a global crisis, with the impact of the Spanish Flu or WWII. There is too much uncertainty to be complacent and factually discard this. This novel virus is from extremistan, and we "just don't know the damage this virus can do".
As they should have until they knew it wasn't as serious as they initially expected.
> CFR is not everything, you may survive the first round, with neurological damage, bone damage, lung damage, testicular damage, heart damage, psychological damage, and kidney damage.
There's zero evidence for any of that.
> This may be how you cope, but you can't say this for sure. There is a proper chance at a global crisis, with the impact of the Spanish Flu or WWII.
There's zero evidence for that too.
Yet another day goes by, yet another day with fewer active cases than the previous day. Yet another day with more resolutions and fewer deaths. We're down to 39K cases active from a peak of 58K.
Evidence of permanent lung damage and psychological damage and kidney damage well-established. The others are by comparing SARS-CoV-1 with SARS-CoV-2.
The WHO telling you it is serious and concerning is from their latest report and findings after returning from China.
Europe is going exponential. There is now a more severe and more infectious strain identified.
Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcJDpV-igjs for Dr Richard Hatchett on the (long-term) dangerous effects of SARS-CoV-2. "Spanish Flu" and "WWII" he says.
3 weeks ago the first Italian got infected. 25% of Italy is now quarantined, no way to go out and buy tinned foods, without risking a 3 months detention and 200$ fine. U.S. hospitals seemingly prepare for 96 million Americans infected, 4.3 million needing hospitalization, and 480.000 deaths, or, to explain to their bosses: "10 times a flu season from hell" on top of their regular work. [1]
Italian hospitals are proposing an age limit for admission to the ICU for viral pneumonia / breathing problems, so they can focus on the young people who will have more years to live.
In China we read that those people go home and take their last breath with their family, watching or hearing their old ones take their last breath, maybe some anti-virals if still available, maybe an open-source pandemic ventilator made by citizen scientists?
Or can we all work together, to reduce the community spread of this virus by just 1% by taking a pro-active scientific approach? 100s of thousands of Americans (or even world citizens) could be saved or improved, if we stop talking about a "carona flu" now.
[1] CDC estimates that influenza was associated with 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths during the 2018–2019 influenza season.
We do not know the mortality rate with any precision at this point and early estimates place it far higher than 0.7%.
Let’s be neither alarmist nor complacent, but above all get our facts right and avoid spreading misleading information.
As with the flu, mortality is highest in older people, and the immunocompromised.
[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...
> This makes a lot of sense as the earliest numbers were based only on people presenting severe symptoms, and huge quantities of people with nCoV are completely and totally asymptomatic.
Isn't another possible explanation that it simply takes very sick people a few weeks to die from it, so if you start counting a week farther back then the confirmed-then-died rate will be higher? (Due to undercounting of people who are going to die from it but haven't yet.)
We need to be careful about what exactly the WHO is reporting. In this case, they are reporting estimates of the crude fatality rate defined as deaths / total cases. This will equal the mortality rate once the outbreak is over, but has limited use during the outbreak as they call out in footnote:
> The Joint Mission acknowledges the known challenges and biases of reporting crude CFR early in an epidemic.
During the outbreak, a better but still imperfect estimate is deaths / settled cases where settled cases is the sum of deaths and recoveries. [1]
> huge quantities of people with nCoV are completely and totally asymptomatic.
From 72.314 cases, as of February 11, 2020, only 889 asymptomatic cases (1%).
> Nevertheless, all CFRs still need to be interpreted with caution and more research is required.
Like the cruise ships:
> The ministry has tested 4,061 people so far, of which 705 were positive, including 392 people who were asymptomatic.
So seems your estimate of "huge numbers of asymptomatic" is not far from the mark. Apologies. See also:
> Asymptomatic infection has been reported, but the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report [due to contact testing] went on to develop disease. The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...
Reasons behind this might be either institutional or purely statistical that is it might be possible that each country can keep alive at least certain number of critical patients and starts to fail when certain number is exceeded and it is possible that smaller number of patients are not representative enough and do not contain high risk patients (elderly, people with other chronic illness etc).
Edit: Diamond Princess is not representative because people have been evacuated and are now counted under countries statistics https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-01/man-dies-...
From what I've read (see below), the current consensus is that China is under-reporting total infected, possibly by an order of magnitude. China also made several missteps in their initial and ongoing response that is likely increasing their mortality rate, especially in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei. Worldwide, there certainly are and will be people who are infected but are asymptomatic, and don't even know (and of course aren't being counted at all).
I would expect that the mortality rate outside China is -- and will stay -- sub-1%, unless it mutates and becomes more deadly, or if health services eventually become overwhelmed due to quick spread. Analysis of primary data seems to indicate that even non-Hubei China has a mortality rate around 0.7%; Hubei's mortality rate is skewing the total upward by a lot. Rest-of-world looks to be around 0.6% so far.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/19/health/coronavirus-china-sars...
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m606
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 (primary data, which links to some analysis and visualizations)
Reasons behind this might be either institutional or purely statistical that is it might be possible that each country can keep alive at least certain number of critical patients and starts to fail when certain number is exceeded and it is possible that smaller number of patients are not representative enough and do not contain high risk patients (elderly, people with other chronic illness etc).
If you look at the recent data then when number of patients approaches 100 then mortality (CFR) exceeds 2%. Only exception seems to be South-Korea. Diamond Princess is not representative because patients are now evacuated and counted under their countries statistics.
The Spanish Flu only had a mortality rate of 1.2% and killed over 30 million people.
[1] https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=2...