10% of Covid patients in intensive care unit | Hacker News Reader

10% of Covid patients in intensive care unit

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10% of all positive cases or 10% of the people who already are seeking advanced medical care?

Their wording is "10% of all positive patients."

The problem I am having is that there is wildly contradictory information coming out. Some numbers that make it sound only a little bit more dangerous than flu, and then something like this that says 10% of positive cases need respirators.

I think until we can be very sure that is not true, we should take this much more seriously. Seems like they are not interested in testing people in the US if they can find any excuse. I hope the people making that decision will review this information.

I don't trust the numbers from Italy and China - Italy because they seem to have lost the control completely and there seems to be no proper testing of significant population or tracking of the infected patients, and China because...China.

So far, it seems Korea has the best data over the situation, and is likely the most applicable for countries with proper public health and medical systems.

Per Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare - http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/upload/viewer/skin/doc.html?fn=158337...

As of today, 150K people tested, 5766 infected, 35 death, 0.6% fatality rate. Their age distribution looks interesting:

0-30: ~2k infected, and no death.

30-50: ~1.5K infected, 2 death (0.1%)

50-59: 1127 infected, 5 death (0.4%)

60-69: 699 infected, 8 death (1.1%)

70-79: 288 infected, 13 death (4.5%)

80+: 127 infected, 7 death (5.6%)

Their number of infected graph is showing some sign of deceleration - the growth rate seems to be leveling off or slowing down slightly.

I think Italy is particularly worth paying attention to as a bad case approximation of what can happen in the US. About a week ago, Korea had tested 90k people while the US had 400 tests available and fewer tested.

Besides lack of testing, the US could turn out even worse than Italy given that many lack insurance and/or cannot afford to call in sick.

I'm growing tired of this meme.

Everybody in the US has insurance, that was literally a major point of contention to Obamacare - the left didn't like that the solution still used private insurers and the right didn't like that they were forced to buy something. If you have a low income, you get subsidized premiums.

For sick pay, it's just a lack of budgeting and planning. If you have a job that pays you $12/hr with no paid leave time or a job that pays you $10/hr with an accumulation of leave hours, it's still the same in the end if you work X days and are sick Y days and get a monthly income of $ZZZ, just in one case your employer is holding back your leave pay and in the other case you're paid full value up front and save for your leave period yourself.

> Everybody in the US has insurance

Isn't that factually wrong ?https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/number-americ...

> it's just a lack of budgeting and planning.

Which people living paycheck to paycheck can't do. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nearly-half-american...

It is factually wrong. The correct way to phrase it would be that anyone can commit moral hazard and sign up for a public plan in response to a sudden need for medical treatment. So insurance can be available in a way that defeats the purpose of insurance systems.

However:

1) This is not free

2) This is not likely to save you from enormous medical costs

3) This is about on par with filing taxes. Probably easy to do if you understand the basics of whats going on, but few people do.

> I don't trust the numbers from Italy and China - Italy because they seem to have lost the control completely and there seems to be no proper testing of significant population or tracking of the infected patients

Based on what? Italy is the country that ran the third highest number of tests. Only China and South Korea ran more. [0]

I hope you don't imagine that the US is doing better than Italy, because you're in for a rude awakening.

[0]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/

I'd love to see an age breakdown of infected from other countries, that alone could explain their lower fatality rate.

I'm surprised how many people can compare it to the flu and be dismissive. If it was possible to catch "the flu" early and never have to deal with it, how much would that be worth? 30,000-60,000 people die every year just in the US and there are herculean efforts to produce, manufacture, and distribute a new vaccine twice a year. So now we're cool with having an additional flu going around?

That's separate from the concerns of too many people getting sick quickly, overwhelming our health system, so people who otherwise would get medical attention die.

>So now we're cool with having an additional flu going around?

When people use the word 'flu' they are often referring to the illness and not the virus. That is, there are several viruses that can cause 'flu-like' symptoms besides the influenza virus.

Without definitive evidence that the covid-19 is 'new', it is reasonable for people to wonder if some cases of the illness commonly referred to as 'flu' for the past 1000 years may actually have been caused by covid-19. In short, are we absolutely sure that there is some statistically signicant increase in the number of flu-like illnesses in the past three months?

I think it's pretty clear from the scientific data that the covid-19 virus is a recent zoonotic infection that jumped from bats to humans (with possibly another animal in between). How could it possibly have caused any human illness before that?

BTW, covid-19 is the disease (same as the flu). The virus is named SARS-Cov-2.

>I think it's pretty clear from the scientific data that the covid-19 virus is a recent zoonotic infection that jumped from bats to humans (with possibly another animal in between).

I know that's what most think. But, what is the evidence? If one were to test samples from 'flu' patients from the 1980s, how do we know one wouldn't find SARS-Cov-2 in some samples? Has anyone done this?

Merely finding similarities between the bat version and human version doesn't tell us anything about how long it's been in the human population. (For that matter, it doesn't tell us if the virus went from bat to human or human to bat... there are for more bats exposed to sources of human viruses than the other way around, you know...)

There is a difference between "you know, we should try to do something about this" and the "OMG, the best-case scenario is that 10% of the population is dead in six months! We're all gonna die! Summon the army and weld people's doors shut!" that people carry on about here all day long.

Worth pointing out that that the average age in Italy is 46 vs 37 in China. Given that old age is well known to increase mortality and morbidity, we should expect worse outcomes in Italy.

Life expectancy between Italy and China differs by about 7 years in Italy's favor, so I guess it's not that big of a difference.

True, but the age distribution skews older in Italy.

Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Italypop.svg China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_pyramid_of_Chi...

The fact that Italy has an older population but a longer life expectancy does not mean the risk of disease to the elderly is any less for Italians. That observation would only make sense if life expectancy were # of years from right now, rather than # of years at death.

I really wish that China had not filtered/hidden the data related to Covid-19 for its population. That would have really helped the rest of the World prepare better.

Right now the rest of the world is just grappling with if the mortality is 3.4% or is it higher or lower. How many, across gender and age groups and so on, end up in ICU vs have milder symptoms, and so on..

The world had time since November but decided to ignore the problem.

This is a blatant lie. In November China was busy persecuting doctors and censoring social media.

It's not China's fault that the US isn't even testing its own healthcare workers displaying symptoms.

You can possibly try to blame China for hiding things up until mid January. But absolutely after that you can’t. At that point the entire world had more than good enough data to see how serious this was and that it was going to become a pandemic. Yet even still now the response in the western world is totally underwhelming for the seriousness of the situation. I’m in Seattle which is heading right towards becoming America’s Wuhan and they still aren’t even cancelling all events or closing all schools and colleges.

I wonder if the economic models of delayed action predict better economic outcomes vs cancelling all events and closing schools early?

I imagine there’s likely to be commissions probing bureaucratic response, and some scapegoating.

There is a big "It won't happen to me" mentality I can see going around. In many people's minds, coronavirus is something people in Asia get, not something westerners get.

Students at the university in my town are bragging about going skiing in northern Italy, saying "It's overblown" and "It won't happen to me".

Even acquaintances are saying "It's just the flu, what's the big deal?".

If they faked the data, they would downplay it just like other bureaucracies who don't want to hurt the economy. The key is speed. As long as extensive tests and quick actions have been done, and hospitals are not overwhelmed, then there shouldn't be big problems. KR and JP will be fine.

It's funny how the same heuristics I have developed around the growth of artificial intelligence are useful here. Spotting long term indicators trending in a bad direction. Having the gumption to examine a repellent conclusion, even though my mind wants to shy away from it. Ignoring ridicule and trusting numbers over social cues.

Not that it's done me any good.

Really really hope people are paying attention to this. Suspect we're just sleepwalking into a disaster.

Literally tens of thousands of people (if not hundreds of thousands) are working on this outbreak. My friend works for the CDC in Atlanta, and the taskforce in that city alone is 1,500 people. They work 75 hrs/wk exclusively on this outbreak.

The idea that the many thousands of people with jobs and doctorates in public health, epidemiology, and medicine would be sleepwalking while you (and I assume some other people) are more aware of the impending disaster is ludicrous.

The problem is not the professionals, who work hard, but those in control who may have other motives like short-term stock market performance.

Then why are we 8 weeks into this and the US has tested approximately no one, while other countries are testing thousands per day? Wtf are these 1500 people doing for 75 hours per week?

Each test kit has a limited number of uses[. The first batch of thousands of test kits had a flaw and couldn't be used[1]. With a limited number of kits, they had to limit testing to high-risk people.

As I've written on HN before, a great deal of the problem is that the current administration appoints political donors and anti-government activists to important roles in agencies handling science and medicine. These are mid-level people whose names almost never end up in news.

So you have incompetent decision makers appointed throughout the organization, funding cuts, discouragement of civil service at all (through things like killing debt forgiveness and stagnating wages), and an administration that publicly denies the problem is even serious because it's afraid of the stock market tanking.

Add to that that the State Dept has been gutted and has many hundreds of open positions that the administration refuses to fill, and you have more disasters like allowing likely-infected Americans to return to the US without testing or quarantine.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/health/coronavirus-testin...

Oh, i'm 100% on board with the fact that it's not the experts' fault. But it's also not at all fair to say "Thousands of people are working on this, so we can't be sleepwalking!" and that's what I was responding to. Thousands of people might be working on this, but if their work is being ignored or undermined, they might as well not be.

I don't think the CDC is sleepwalking. I think the american public "iT's JuSt ThE fLu" is sleepwalking.

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