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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was an assessment with error bars not spanning multiple orders of magnitude...

Jokes aside. If the number was true, for Italy (33k reported deaths) this would give around 12M infected. For US (99k reported deaths) around 36M infected. Those numbers seem to be unrealistic. I remember Italy did some tests and even in the worst hit places less than 7% of population developed antibodies, not average 25% for entire Italy as suggested.

I know this is very, very back of envelop calculation but it would be nice to somehow reconcile those numbers.

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Italy is one of the 7 outlier countries. It has an IFR even above 1%. But Italy is always the highest flu outlier worldwide (regularily above 1%), so there no reason to bring Italy into the discussion.

The other outliers are much more interesting, like Belgium, which has also a reporting problem. UK, NL, Spain,...

0.3% has been the established number for a few months already. Reporting always concentrated on the meaningless CFR at 3.4%, for political reasons. 10x more asymptotic cases also reflect all the antibody tests. Asymptotic means an ordinary cold.

That's why it's so dangerous. Low fatality rate, no symptoms, high reproduction.

So you're just going to ignore the randomized antibody tests they did in Italy and Spain?

Sometimes, some situations are just not representative and we don't always know the reason.

For example, mortality might have been higher because of inadequate care at the highest of the pandemic. Or there might be some genes that are prevalent or absent in the population that are specific to the region that make the virus behave differently than for the rest of the world.

Indeed Spain is the most interesting outlier. One of the world's best health systems, but still an pretty high IFR, much higher than all its neighbors. Will need a few more weeks to explain that. Haven't even heard some ideas why. I'm more watching genetics, maybe their strand was very different.

Initially I thought of those numbers (36m in the US) as totally unrealistic. But then comparing to seasonal influenza case counts, they seem to be within that order of magnitude (39m-56m cases): https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

would that be implausible? am I misunderstanding or comparing the wrong metrics?

I'm actually curious to see the time interval of when the first true COVID-19 case appeared plotted over first true 2019-2020 influenza cases. If along the same timeline, you'd figure that social distancing would have affected the R0 of both.

Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 is truly more (or comparably) contagious, 36M could be plausible.

To be clear: I am not equivalating COVID-19 fatality rate w/ the flu, or suggesting it is "innocuous" as the flu is.

But these numbers cannot be compared as a lockdown is in effect..

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