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Comment by Frost1x | Hacker News Reader

It's certainly an incredibly complex multifaceted issue. It would be interesting with the correct data to model the infection rate and mortality rate.

As a back of the envelop calculation from someone who doesn't do epidemiological modeling, the US has ~330M people. The flu itself infects 5-20% of the population from what I read so let's say this virus infects a conservative 3%, we're at 9.9M.

Based on the data I'm seeing, mortality rate is higher than 3% but there's a lot of factors that go into that (so who knows), so were at just shy of 300k deaths. I think those are conservative figures, personally. My guess is the transmission rate and mortality rates are both higher but there are again so many unknowns.

https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/01/23/coronavirus-outbreak-mapping-...

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The mortality rate, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, may be far lower than 1% as we’ve been discovering lots of mild cases.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

I think it’s more and more looking like the mortality rate is lower than initially predicted due to massive underreporting of asympomatic/mild cases. Looking at the Diamond Princess there are (so far) 6 deaths out of 700+ cases in a population skewed towards risk groups.

So assuming 40% of the world gets it, and 1% mortality that's about 30,120,000 dead.

If it's 70% of the world gets it approximately 52,710,000 dead

however, I think once we're at 40% of the population having it I would expect things to go worse because that is a lot of people overloading the health system.

Ehh, nature, she always drags some series into the mix - the mortality rate is a function of distribution across age and other health factors - it doesn't seem to drive the immune system bonkers, so WHO is calling out higher risks to older people, esp those with additional factors such as cardiac or pulmonary impairment. Probably due to the fact this is fundamentally a respiratory issue. Abstractly, more data always helps in spite of the cost to get it, but for us in the USA, the last official action has been to delete the tests_administered count from daily CDC reporting. So that makes any projection more guesswork than not.

Mortality rate is almost certainly lower, actually. 3% is already on the high end of the high estimates I've been hearing, which were 2%. This article says 1%: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/worse-than-the...

"If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate."

With treatment. 10-20% of patients end up requiring intensive medical support, including mechanical ventilation. Will they recieve it? It's more contagious than the Spanish Flu. There simply aren't enough ICU beds - let alone ones equipped to isolate highly contagious disease.

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