The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong, and Everyone Knows It
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The Diamond Princess is an unintentional "natural" experiment. It is likely that the disease spread much more effectively aboard the ship than it would elsewhere in the world, but otherwise, the data should be useful.
Keep in mind that cruises skew older (than the overall population), even when accounting for crew -- so you might expect higher mortality than in a random sample, but it is as good of a natural experiment as we are going to get.
(This is relevant because older people die more often -- for example, at age 80, you have a 10% chance of death by any cause each year anyway -- and with this now being day 42 since the outbreak, that's more than 10% of a year, so you'd expect 1% of 80-year-olds aboard to have died even without the virus for example)
So far, 706 cases yielded 6 deaths ruled caused by the virus, 1 death ruled unrelated to the virus, and 36 serious active cases, with 212 declared recovered to date.
Most of these cases are more than 21 days old now, so most of the remaining mild cases will likely be resolved soon (either by recovery or by becoming a serious case).
The #dead and #serious have been stable for almost a week at this point. We will see what happens, of course.
There was simply not enough resources to service everyone, and those that came later, probably fared worse, and lost their lives.
In a normal situation, the sick people would be more evenly spread out across the country, that all the hospitals and clinics should be able to handle them, and provide them with medical care in a timely manner.
The key indicator to realize how deadly this virus is, might actually be Italy. There, the virus diffused evenly throughout the country, that their medical system should be able to handle the caseload. We shall see how well this theory plays out in 2 weeks.