Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

You're comparing a virus that early on was reported as 3-4% to one that early on was reported as 0.4%.

The cruise ship and South Korea are probably closest to the true death rate of this virus. CFR in South Korea is currently around 0.8%. A common "educated guess" I see from people that work on this is its probably around 0.5%-1% assuming you can get the care needed for it.

View on HN

This reflects the opinions shared by Michael Osterholm, Amesh Adalja, and Nicholas Christakis: a final case mortality of ~0.7%. But just to highlight the point, that's on a strong assumption that critical cases receive proper medical attention. I don't think that's a safe assumption for the outbreak in the United States.

Now it's really not the time to speculate with numbers that could downplay the risks. We'll see in a few years. 0.\d+% could be someone we love. Keep safe. Prevent if you can.

I'm just quoting experts. But I agree with your point. Only one of them stated that figure with "confidence", but he also was clearly motivated to downplay the risk because he was worried about panic. My intuition is that a final case mortality < 1.5% would be towards a "best case" outcome; and we should expect worse.

Currently, we have 7 total reported deaths from the cruise ship and 696 confirmed cases. Seeing that it's been a long while since the outbreak, let's assume all current cases will survive; this puts us to 1% CFR. But note that Cruise Ship had a higher average age than public, so assuming you'll receive all the medical care you need, ~1% CFR seems to be a good approximate upper-bound estimate.

The majority of people on the cruise ship were older and it's not at all representative of the real population.

That's why I said an "upper-bound" approximation. As in, CFR for general population is likely below 1%.

IIRC all or almost all of those 7 were over 80.

I heard "all over 80" on HN and reddit multiple times as well, but could not confirm. Regardless, Italy's official average age of death is 81, so it wouldn't be surprising.

6 in the 70-79 bracket and one in 80-89, but 70-79 was also the biggest group. https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_crui...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com