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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

I think when all the dust will settle, we will know the real death count by doing a delta of total deaths of 2020 vs. 2019 and 2018. There will be two main reasons of the extra deaths:

1. Deaths related directly by Covid-19. (either the disease itself, or the underlying conditions got worse by the disease)

2. People that didn't have the coronavirus, but died because they couldn't get the usual care due to hospitals being totally overwhelmed (things like heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, insuline/asma shock, etc... turn into death sentences)

Same as in war, while many deaths are caused directly by the fighting, a lot of the other extra deaths are indirect (famine, disease... etc)/

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Also the article assumes 100% infected. If it is only 50%, then death rate is 0.5%. Although the graph does show there are more deaths expected.

We can actually expect the mortality rate is a lot lower than 1% if the hospitals are not overloaded.

Counterpoint as at March 23rd: “Among 3,711 Diamond Princess passengers and crew, 712 (19.2%) had positive test results for SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 1). Of these, 331 (46.5%) were asymptomatic at the time of testing. Among 381 symptomatic patients, 37 (9.7%) required intensive care, and nine (1.3%) died (8). As of March 13, among 428 U.S. passengers and crew, 107 (25.0%) had positive test results for COVID-19; 11 U.S. passengers remain hospitalized in Japan (median age = 75 years), including seven in serious condition (median age = 76 years).” - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e3.htm

So mortality rate is 1.3% and expected to rise, but that is probably skewed by age cohorts, so rate in countries with more young people than a cruise ship might be expected to be lower.

Potentially a 2020 vs previous years approach would even slightly underestimate the death toll.

I have to assume being in lockdown suppresses other 'normal' causes of death (fewer car accidents, or conventional disease spread). Depending on how long these lockdowns really last, it could actually dent the real impact of those causes of death, making the covid peak look slightly smaller vs the average.

We can subtract traffic accidents, homicides, suicides, falls etc and compare only remaining numbers.

https://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.html

If I am reading that correctly, some countries like Spain see almost annual death spikes to around 8 standard deviations. That doesn’t make sense, what did I miss?

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