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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

The death rate is about 10 times lower than the original estimates stated.

If you don't make stuff then there isn't stuff. People like this act as if goods just materialize from nothing.

I'm no doctor. I just tried to research the COVID death rate and I found a lot of conflicting and nuanced information. My impression is that if you want to make claims around this, you should cite sources. Unfortunately the best articles I found on this were somewhat dated. I don't think I can offer either correction or rebuttal.

I think we can agree that there is a significant cost to having folks not work. As I read it, TFA is mainly pointing out the significant conflict of interest here. Big business owners have big incentives to get production back on track, but face little risk from the disease. Workers need money, but will also be the ones who will face the risks.

Ummm?

I will offer this: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-worlds-highest-coronaviru...

And this that shows we are currently sitting at 6%: https://covidusa.net/

Even if testing ramps up seems hard to imagine a world where this drops by a factor of 10.

So what are you talking about?

Case fatality rate isn't the same as the actual mortality rate. Case fatality rate is an indirect measure of your testing ability, testing criteria, and testing procedures. It says very little about how deadly the disease is, and comparing it across countries is completely useless.

Actually, it's worse than useless, because any conclusions made from it are going to be horribly wrong.

That is exactly why I included the first link in my reply above which makes that distinction.

The headline: "Limited coronavirus testing in the US has meant its death rate appears alarmingly high — but it will likely drop"

Many experts were saying a million deaths in the us.

Poster said "death rate" not number of deaths.

Which is why we locked down major cities to slow down the spread. We don't know how many would have died otherwise but it would have been a lot more. Saying that the experts who urged us to lock down to avoid millions of deaths were wrong because we locked down and there weren't millions of deaths is a bit odd.

My recollection, which could be flawed, were that some experts projected millions of deaths even with lockdown. Moreover I recall the experts not disclaiming their predictions, which is a huge problem. The fact of the matter is that we don't know what would have happened, and experts and policymakers alike (IMO) are in desperate need to figuring out how to convey uncertainty with honesty, ahead of time, not retrospectively. Treat your information consumers with respect for their intelligence and they just might not act like idiots.

Projected before any response. That was pre-lockdown. That was at a time where there were no tests because the CDC botched trying to manufacture their own. If business as usual carried on since mid March we could have seen those numbers realized.

That is the ultimate joke in all this - if expertise is correct and mitigates the virus and prevents the worst case scenario agendas will push rhetoric that they were exaggerated estimates and overblew the situation. And they can say that with confidence knowing any worst case scenario was avoided.

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