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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

> COVID certainly has a lower mortality right now

Yep. A vast majority of those who've contracted COVID are asymptomatic. The mortality rate might be significantly lower than previously reported.

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One way to find out is to look at the overall death rates (of all causes) in an area and see how it evolved. NY started doing that and found there's a discrepancy. One explanation among others is that some people who've caught it and died from it never got a positive test (either no test, or false negative).

That seems to point to the opposite happening: a higher mortality that is still not fully understood for lack of accurate data.

Don't forget the secondary effects of shutting down entire countries: depression, supply chain failures, sudden poverty, degradation of infrastructure, and increasingly lack of exercise and unhealthy eating as this drags on.

I suspect that will account for most of the differential, and possibly even be the more important number. (because many countries diagnose deaths with covid as deaths by covid)

The secondary effects are much worse. The virus is being used as an excuse to get more control of the people and planet by the psychopaths. They don't really care about us.

I don't know why something so easily disproved is being repeated so often. The worst-case of an economic shutdown is not worse than 2 million dead people.

Added bonus: the economic outcome of 2 million dead people is bad too, perhaps worse than a shutdown of (largely) healthy people. It's not an either/or, economic hardship right now is unavoidable. The choice is between getting a handle on the virus or not, and thousands dead instead of millions.

Later on it may be a major factor, but right now it is probably outweighed in the counts by less car accident deaths, lower transmission of other communicable respiratory diseases, and less work and leisure accidents.

I do overall agree with you, but Norway has lower than usual number of deaths this year, so not sure what to do with that. I guess if you just compare the deaths to average you are still under reporting because of the stay at home orders it is sort of expected that less people die.

Not just Norway, India too.

The antibody tests in New York showed 12. 3% for the state and 19% infection rate for the city

https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-new-york-antibody-test-f4f...

Confirmed and probable deaths are 16700 for a population of 8.4 million we come to about 1% IFR. However the excess deaths (for example how we count deaths during flu seasons) are 21000, so we are likely undercounting covid 19 deaths. Based on that number the IFR is 1.2% both these numbers are significantly higher than the flu. The other thing is that the numbers there are taken at similar times. However there is an incubation time of about 4 days (IIRC) and a time to death from first symptoms of about 10 days. So we really should compare the infection rate now with the death toll in 2 weeks. Which likely will increase IFR

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-crisis-210...

19.9% for the city.

You are still in the end of the flu season though so some of those excess death numbers might be that.

> A vast majority of those who've contracted COVID are asymptomatic.

Any sources on that?

From the https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E... it looks like at most 17% could be asymptomatic, but I'm not sure if it wouldn't be lower if they waited longer.

Age affects everything. The diamond princess cohort is much older than the population average. Older people are more likely to die from the disease, suffer symptoms from the disease, and catch the disease, all things being held equal.

The concept of death rates, symptomatic rates, and even transmission rates as a generic term is meaningless because it depends entirely on the age demographics of the population (and behavior, and other things, etc.).

The idea the most people who catch it are asymptomatic is true if our antibody tests aren't throwing out massive false positive rates. For something closer to the general population, the USS Theodore Roosevelt is probably a better guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_USS_Theod...

Looks like 90% of them had the disease on April 11. By April 20, 60% were asymptomatic. The last update seems to have been on April 22, with about 50% asymptomatic. That's probably a good bet for an actual figure in my opinion.

I would assume the crew of a military ship are substantially younger and healthier than the general population. Since both health and age seem to play a key role, 50% is almost certainly an upper bound, with the true number lying between 17% and 50%

There are indications that severity of infection is proportional to the initial viral load. I'd imagine that being locked in close quarters on a warship would subject the sailors to a higher viral load than you'd expect in the general population, and subsequently they'd have on average more severe infections, so it could be lower than 50%.

Most will be in the range of 20-40. Some will be older, but none will be kids. So take it as you will. The true number doesn't have any intuitive meaning anyway, since the likelihood of being infected is correlated with the likelihood of being symptomatic.

E.g. if hypothetically people under 20 never exhibit symptoms but also never get the disease, they won't bring the asymptomatic rate down because they won't be infected in the first place.

Averages suck in this context.

> Looks like 90% of them had the disease on April 11. By April 20, 60% were asymptomatic.

That's not what the wikipedia says... 94% of the crew has been tested for Covid, with 678 positives. Infection rate ~15%.

From those infected, ~60% didn't show symptoms.

That's correct, my mistake on the infection rate of 90%. The 60% on the wiki figure is coming from an article written April 16. I did a bit of digging and found a navy statement from the 22nd which said 50%.

However given my error on the 90%, it seems much more likely that a large proportion of the people asymptomatic on the 22nd had caught it more recently than I was assuming, so the asymptomatic rate is probably a bit worse.

More likely much higher when you start parsing how China determines COVID cases/deaths. Or those people not allowed in hospitals. There deaths do not count.. so there is a big difference but going the other way.

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