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Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

The first one is trivially wrong. In NYC more than 0.1% of the _population_ (not the infected) has died already.

The second is less trivially wrong, but there's a lot of evidence against it: tests from Wuhan[0], Denmark[1], the Netherlands[2] all show very low infection rates, around 3-4%.

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-starts-testing-to-determi...

[1]: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-17-stor-screening-vis...

[2]: https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/16/3-dutch-blood-donors-covid-19-...

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There was a town in Italy that actually had 70% positive antibodies among blood donors. The only problem is 1.4% of the population of the town died in March.

Which town?

Castiglione d'Adda

So 1% death rate per unit population, or 1 person in 100.

I guess that means if New York's lock down didn't reduce that 70% of the population getting infected, with a population of 20M or so they can expect around 2M deaths.

Also bears pointing out that that the real number of deaths in NYC is higher since some have died in their homes or before they could be tested.

The second one is trivially wrong as well. The allegation is that 50% of Sweden has had it and recovered but this would require antibody tests to prove. On which date is it proposed that Sweden passed that halfway mark and had sufficient time to recover?

March 31st deaths from Covid-19 in Sweden: 180

April 17th deaths from Covid-19 in Sweden: 1400

It has been > 7x deaths just within April.

I think NYC is already at the "hospital collapse" level tho.

The quoted figure would be for a situation with hospitals in perfect operational state.

So the Sweden reasoning is: we will stay within normal capacity even at peak, and everything will be ok.

If infection rate is actually slow, that may work, but it's not obvious this is true.

Have the hospitals in New York collapsed? Has anyone been denied treatment because the hospital couldn't handle it?

that's a good question, and I don't know the answer, I would presume nobody as been denied treatment as that never happened in Lombardy either, you can usually send people to other hospitals, and this has happened in NY too.

But you don't need to reach the level of people being denied treatment to be at an "overwhelming" level, where the hospitals are not operating at peak efficiency.

There have been many reports of hospitals not having masks, gowns and so on, or lacking ventilators or few people able to use them which need to be overworked. Many hospital workers have been infected, and hospitals had to switch to longer shifts.

It's just not business as usual.

The second one is also trivially wrong - if Sweden had a majority of the population infected we would be seeing similar or higher death rates than NYC there (which we don't yet).

Yeah, I maintain that whenever you allow your mental model of the world to drift away from reality, there's a price to be paid. There's a cost to being wrong and people should put more effort into challenging their beliefs.

I can't believe someone disagreed with this. Some people have mental models so far disconnected from reality that I can't even fathom them.

17,671 deaths / 8,398,748 population * 100% = 0.21%

I think that’s a misleading denominator to use, because we don’t know how those that haven’t got it will react once they get it. Better to use actual infected or some mix of recovered and currently infected. You will get a 10x higher number at least.

I think it's that denominator just to demonstrate that the 0.1% figure is totally made up and ridiculous.

New York State have a population closer to 20,000,000. I'm not saying Giesecke is right, but he could possibly be much more right than the official WHO number. I don't think you can compare the death count from place to place that easily either, you have to take the general health of the population and how the medical services have coped with it.

Your deaths figure seems to be for New York State, while your population figure is for New York City.

The correct figures (as of April 18, 2020) is:

New York State: 14,636 deaths / 19.45M population = 0.0752%

New York City: 8,893 deaths / 8.3M population = 0.1071%

Worldometers is likely more accurate, it gives 17,671, not 14,636.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Antibody tests in Chicago show as high as 50%

https://chicagocitywire.com/stories/530092711-roseland-hospi...

Thats from patients, not the general population so its completely irrelevant in this thread.

Apologies.

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