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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

I would guess the numbers are overstated due to cases being "clinically" diagnosed without an actual test (i.e. doctor looks at symptoms and says you probably have Covid)

We also have no idea of test accuracy across the myriad of tests being administered. Look to the Spanish Flu post analysis to see how wide the StdDev will likely be.

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Counterpoint. Countries are reporting higher death rates in even if you take out the deaths attributed to COVID-19. One possible explanation for this difference is people are dying from COVID-19 and not being counted as victims of the pandemic.

Financial Times has some reporting on this.

Case in point, we will never really know and we should feel lucky that this wasn't catastrophic and we got away with our lack of preparedness.

I think the count of the number of countries that have got away this outbreak is much smaller than the number of countries still dealing with the outbreak.

I would also say many of these countries are just at the start of this process.

The are only a few ways a country can get over the virus:

1. Find a vaccine (which is still months/years away).

2. Impose very strict isolation rules (i.e. New Zealand)

3. Develop heard immunity (i.e. reach a point where 70+% of the population have been infected).

Everyone got off easy because the CFR is single digits, likely less than 1%.

I'm talking about a real epidemic, where one in 3-5 died, than things would be real bad.

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