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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

Current total deaths are 6,000 with China already saying the worst is behind them. Why the US would have 4M deaths?

Probably means 4M assuming that no containment measures are taken.

Like someone said on twitter, “In the end, it will be impossible to know if we overreacted or did too much, but it will be QUITE apparent if we under reacted or did too little.”

Right, the rich have nothing to lose, the poorer capitalists pay for the over reaction. That's why we see an over reacting, panicking society, because the rich benefit from it. It is the only reason they do anything, I hate to break it to you.

If nothing is done, the least privileged will suffer the most due lack of access to health services and a financial safety net.

But what is most assuredly going to happen is what benefits rich people. The rest is collateral damage or pure luck. Is what it is, nothing new under the sun.

The number coming out of China do not seem... completely above board and have been questioned by many people. Also as other have said, China, being an authoritarian country, had the power to lock down in ways that the US simply is not ready for or willing to put up with. Already in KY we've had a man who refused to self isolate after testing positive so now we have to station someone outside his house. We have 21 cases total.

We need a couple more cases like that for people to be out baying for blood and for pandemic-level laws that allow people to be jailed/isolated forcibly.

China nipped this before they spent much time in the exponential phase:

http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#g8

US is tracking highly with Italy, but 12 days behind.

How is the US 12 days behind? Where does that number come from? The first Italian case was a month after the first US case.

https://i.redd.it/apxxmlc4kfm41.jpg

Interesting, but to truly track similar to Italy wouldn't we need higher numbers being we're a much larger populous? Just curious.

Each outbreak is regional, having the numbers normalised to the total country population doesn't really give interesting information. It is the medical system of that specific region that is at risk of saturation.

The US isn't doing anywhere near as much testing as Italy.

Population of Italy is 60m and the US is 327m.

Land size if Italy is 116,347 mi², land size of US is 3.797 million mi²

I don't think it's fair to make any assumptions from those infection numbers when the two countries are vastly different.

Iirc the first us case was isolated, what really matters is the first community spread. The 12 days comes from lining up the curves. Our current # of cases is where Italy was 12 days ago.

Seems like cherry-picking to me.

Italy has an older population to start with. I don't think the US will remotely reach the chaos we are seeing in Italy.

China shut down their entire economy for about 6 weeks. That's what we're debating here, whether we should do that in the US.

China is still locked down. It can’t unlockdown until they have a way to stop it, they’ve basically managed to reset the clock to early January.

Wuhan is still locked down, but most of China seems somewhat "restarted" by now.

Yeah, most if not all of the larger cities are back to work now.

The worst is behind China because they've instituted heavy lockdown measures beyond what would be acceptable in the US, and enacted emergency measures like constructing temporary hospitals and isolation centres. They're still under lockdown - Beijing for instance is mulling a mandatory 14-day quarantine for anyone entering the city. So far, only a handful of other countries, mostly Asian ones, have had success slowing down this virus.

Most of Europe and North America is on a steady exponential curve upwards with no sign of slowing down yet. Germany has already clearly said that they expect 70-80% of the population to be infected eventually - 60M people, of whom ~2% or 1.2M will likely die. Scale that up to the USA.

Without a vaccine, the only way this virus peters out is through eventual herd immunity, which will require a sizeable fraction of the population to catch it.

> Current total deaths are 6,000 with China already saying the worst is behind them. Why the US would have 4M deaths?

The official Chinese death statistics are probably severely under-counting deaths, in Wuhan at least. IIRC, they only counted deaths of confirmed cases, but the medical system was so overwhelmed that many, many cases weren't getting confirmed, and people were dying at home.

I agree that "millions will die" is just pure panic. But I'd like to point out that China is most definitely _not_ out of the woods yet. And won't be until there's a cure. This merry-go-round could start again there at a moment's notice.

I don't get this sentiment, I mean numbers are pretty clear at this point. We have +-2% mortality rate, and that when system is not utterly overloaded and those critical patients (15-20%) are getting artificial ventilation and very personalized treatment. Without it, most if not all would die.

So real mortality, once health systems will crumble from the load (we will see in 1 week here in Europe), might be more around 10%. Not many seem to like to accept this simple fact, happy to hear where my conclusion is wrong. I mean if you have water/mucus in your lungs, that's it, very little can be done.

If we take >50% of earth population would eventually take it (which seems more realistic, since we have no vaccine, and no effective treatment and those won't work very well in many places like India or most of Africa), we're talking about 80 million - 400 million of dead (2-10% of 4 billions). I don't see how we can avoid this - we can't shutdown whole global economy for even 6 months, whole system didn't evolve with this safeguard in mind. People will have to start working again. Producing food, goods, services etc.

Now lets be skeptical and have only 10% of those horrible numbers coming true - still talking about 8-40 millions of dead.

You're confusing things. Not everyone who has the disease is diagnosed or treated in a hospital. In fact the majority of people are probably not. As the healthcare system is stressed, you will see higher "mortality" in the hospital cases because only the extremely severe patients will seek treatment and the rest will try to get by on their own. None of this is _population_ mortality. Meaning, these numbers cannot be extrapolated to the population as a whole, due to the selection bias inherent in them, and the lack of accurate infection rate estimates.

That would cover the sceptical 10%. But OK, lets be really sceptical and have only 1% - still 800k - 4 millions. Sounds a bit like millions to me

This ignores several things. For one thing we might get a reprieve due to seasonality. For another, better treatments will almost certainly be found in the near future. Some are undergoing trials as we speak. Then there's the issue of people who will acquire immunity and therefore cease to be transmission vectors. And then there's the most glaring issue: less than 6K people are likely to die in the _very epicenter_ of the epidemic: in China. Out of 55M people in that region. People are returning to work there now. So this can be contained, with drastic measures. And you can bet drastic measures will be taken if we even begin to approach seven figure casualty counts. Extrapolated from 55M Hubei population to 331M of US population, this would be less than 40K dead: on the order of a severe flu season, but compressed into 3 months. That's in the absence of any advanced treatments, and with a healthcare system arguably inferior to what you'd find in the West.

Sure, though that number that you have memorized for the world population is wrong. We're at approx 7.8 billion rather than 4 billion.

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