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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

No country's numbers of confirmed cases should really be treated as a definitive and accurate view of total number of cases. UK was estimating theirs was off by a factor of 10-20 not long ago. The lack of testing has resulted in very incomplete data around the world, whether or not there's a political motive behind that.

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Agreed. I have some friends here who are fairly certain they had it, based on symptoms. However, the hospital refused to test them because they were "young and healthy" (i.e. no underlying medical conditions to complicate things). 2 of the 3 family members recovered with no outside assistance; the third worsened, so they took her to the ER. Only then did they run a test on her.

The number of infected is way off, which will throw everything else off. You can't figure out mortality rates, infection rates, etc if you don't have an accurate number to start with. Garbage in, garbage out.

I've been saying for a couple weeks that the mortality rate will turn out to be much much lower if/when we ever get proper data on this. Probably very close to the common flu (0.1-0.2%). But the media companies are all having a great time scaring everyone with their 3% figure in the meantime.

> However, the hospital refused to test them because they were "young and healthy" (i.e. no underlying medical conditions to complicate things).

The tests have a high false negative rate, which is one reason some countries are not testing everyone with mild symptoms. The test doesn't give you any useful information in that situation: if it comes back positive you need to self-isolate, but if it comes back negative and you have symptoms you still need to self isolate.

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