Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

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The 1.4% apply to the general population. For people over 80, the fatality rate is 15%. There are roughly 13 million people over 80 in the US [1]. If everyone gets infected, a fatality rate of 15% means 2 million deaths in that single bracket alone. With the 1.4% figure it's 4.6 million over the entire US population.

As a comparison, the number of yearly deaths in the US caused by influenza is in the 5 digits. World war 2 killed 3% of the world population over a range of multiple years [2]. If the coronavirus kills only 1% of the current world population, its death toll in absolute numbers will be equal to WW2.

I think at this point, the disease can't be contained, its spread only slowed. Everyone will be exposed to it sooner or later. Fortunately though there are treatments, and there are already candidates for vaccines. The question is only how quickly and how well those treatments can be deployed. The less people have the disease at the same time, the better.

[1]: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

This is badly misinterpreting the data. You cannot extrapolate the fatality rate of lab-confirmed infections to the general population.

This is especially true in scenarios where the infection is predominantly mild. This is also especially true in scenarios where diagnostic testing bandwidth was being stressed. Both are true in this case. I fully expect the general population fatality rate for COVID will be on the order of 0.1% or less of all infected. Keeping in mind the true denominator will never actually be known.

At risk of belaboring the point... you state that the fatality rate for people over 80 is 15%. This is false. Maybe it is accurate to say that the fatality rate is 15% for people over 80 who go to the hospital. That is a massively important qualifier to the statement. The fatality rate for all infected people over 80 is not known. The closest you can get is looking at Diamond Princess, where everyone was exposed and as of right now 6 of 3700 died, and that’s in a population skewing elderly.

> you state that the fatality rate for people over 80 is 15%. This is false.

Check this study, it contains that number: http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

Yes, most people studied were symptomatic, so asymptomatic people weren't checked.

> The closest you can get is looking at Diamond Princess, where everyone was exposed and as of right now 6 of 3700 died, and that’s in a population skewing elderly.

First, we can't be sure that everyone was exposed to the disease. Even if we assume that everyone was exposed, then I still interpret the numbers differently from you: first, patients on Diamond Princess were subject to medical attention so they likely saved many lives, and second, A total number of 705 of 3700 people became ill enough to be able to confirm the disease on them, the same category of people the 1.4% or the 15% were calculated on. So assume for a moment that 1 out of 5 people exposed become confirmably ill. Even if you divide the number of deaths by 5, it's still a large number and larger than influenza or other diseases.

Everyone on Diamond Princess was tested serologically. I have no idea how particularly sick or not each person who tested positive ultimately became. We only know that only 6 (so far) have died. That’s 0.8% of those that tested positive, and 0.016% of those on the ship, in an elderly skewing population, I’m not sure that’s worse than a bad flu outbreak.

Again, they were treated. Mortality rate with treatment will always be lower than mortality rate without. Right now the numbers outside china are still manageable so all severe cases have access to treatment. But once large parts of the population are affected, this won't be the case. Thus it's important to prepare production of enough medication now.

This is an important point and often overlooked. In Italy and Iran this is leading to issues, local healthcare is overwhelmed and transporting patients to other regions is for obvious reasons not a very good idea.

CFR can only be determined from those cases that have run their course, and for the Diamond Princess cases I would argue that the numbers are still too low to draw any conclusions from. So far we know 7 people have have died and 10 have recovered. That is much too little data to extrapolate from (and if you did then you'd end up with horrific numbers). And then there's the fact that cruise ship populations tend to skew very much towards the elderly, they are are essentially floating retirement homes for wealthy retirees.

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