Deaths / Deaths + Recoveries gives a 5.7% death rate.
Obviously there are mild cases that are never diagnosed, but it seems if you get sick enough for a confirmed diagnosis, your risk is higher than generally reported.
Obviously there are mild cases that are never diagnosed, but it seems if you get sick enough for a confirmed diagnosis, your risk is higher than generally reported.
The biggest challenge is we only have ~20 mechanical ventilators per 100k people[0]. That means our entire nation's capacity for mechanical ventiation (excluding overload from regional clusters) is consumed with just 200 infections per 100k - or 660k infections of the US's 330 million.
That doesn't account for baseline ICU/vent usage, which is estimated at at ~70% occupancy rate with 3 in 10 currently needing mechanical vents [1].
A fuzzy summary is 500k infections in the use will utilize all existing mechanical ventilators.
[0] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 - this was 2010, but the most recent data I could easily find. [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23963122
So that death rate is likely far, far lower than what it seems. The flu kills between 15-60k people in the US every year, and it's around 1% fatality rate (and nobody seems overly concerned about that).
This virus is an unknown. It is spreading worldwide very quickly and the growth rate is exponential. Within months, hundreds of millions could be infected without interventions. Today the number of dead is very small. If the virus were to become as common as the flu, it could make infectious disease the leading cause of death, more than heart disease or cancer. We still don't know what the long term health complications are or if you can be re-infected. The science will be in shortly, but in the mean time an abundance of caution would seem to be warranted. I will be washing my hands until then.
That's for a very obvious reason. If 40 million people in the US get Covid, as with the flu, it will probably kill between 500k and 1m people.
That's unlikely to happen based on what we know so far. However if two million people get it, that will kill as many as the flu and produce ~200,000 ICU cases. That's far beyond what the US healthcare system can handle on top of routine circumstances.
Along with a drastically higher mortality rate, Covid also produces a far higher rate of ICU outcomes than flu does. It swamps healthcare systems, as we saw so dramatically in China.
This is a greatly, greatly exaggerated number based on incomplete reporting.
We cannot yet estimate the number of unconfirmed COVID-19 cases in the US. In healthy adults, the COVID-19 symptoms are no worse than the flu. The CDC uses projections to estimate the fatality rate of the flu every year, since actual hard stats are impossible to generate. Time will tell, but this so far seems nothing more than a media frenzy.
Does anyone remember the Swine Flu? How about the West Nile Virus? What was the outcome of those media frenzies? How'd it turn out for all the people hoarding toilet paper and water bottles back then?
> It swamps healthcare systems, as we saw so dramatically in China
I don't think it's even remotely relatable to the US healthcare system, and the general health of the US population.
The undetected case issue can be addressed by intensively studying smaller populations and extrapolating to the general population. The Diamond Princess or other cases where every person in a defined population was tested and monitored would be a good place to start. The exponential growth issue can be solved with cohort analysis, group people by the date of their onset of symptoms and track the resolution for each group.
With a few more weeks of data we should start to see these studies, then we'll know just how serious this is.
If you're sick enough to go to the doctor and be diagnosed with the flu, there's likely an increased chance of it being fatal (in that your symptoms are extreme or you're already high-risk, ie. elderly or in poor health).
Otherwise, like most folks, you just get better on your own in a few days.
With the flu killing 10's of thousands every year, and nobody bats an eye... I'm not particularly concerned about COVID-19. It's mostly a media PR stunt at this point - designed to whip up fear and clicks. Swine Flu anyone?
Knowing that, it seems pretty clear that COVID-19 is more-or-less 10x deadlier[2] than seasonal influenza, as the CFR for seasonal flu is ~0.1-0.2%.
[1] It's a little more complicated with the flu because of underreporting. I guess elderly pneumonia is common enough that doctors don't always care why it developed. So apparently the CDC uses a more complex model (e.g. total number of pneumonia cases minus base rate, non-flu season cases). But what they're trying to estimate is the CFR, which is by definition deaths/confirmed.
[2] At least from an epidemiological perspective, regardless of the percentage of symptomatic cases / infections. At the end of the day what matters is how many will die, not how scared someone should be if they're infected.
This is not true[1]. CDC projects the numbers and estimates total number of cases, because almost all of the actual cases are undiagnosed. So no, COVID-19 is not "more-or-less 10x deadlier" than the common Flu.
Let's be clear. The media frenzy around COVID-19 is not grounded in science, and it purely designed to get panic people, resulting in clicks and eye-balls. Nothing more.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm