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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

Without a lockdown, it’s still possible. Latest estimates are 0.5-1 percent fatality rate, which maps to 2-3 million people here in the US, and if everyone got ill in a short succession, because it is very contagious, the death toll would certainly be higher.

Recent birthday party, 20 people, every single one caught the disease.

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The 0.5-1% fatality rate would be a LOT higher if all those people did fall sick at the same time.

Hospital systems would collapse because of the number of sick people. Doctors and nurses would be missing because they would almost all likely fall sick.

And people who would not die of COVID would die of other stuff because healthcare systems would have collapsed.

This is what happened in Italy. This is what was happening in NYC for a few days at its worst. This is what is about to happen in Brazil and possibly in India.

> Latest estimates are 0.5-1 percent fatality rate

I read just a couple of days ago that the IFR (infection fatality rate) is only ~0.25%-0.3%? Still ~four times higher than that of the flu, but not ten times greater.

yes, IFR was trending toward 0.2-0.3% even in march, and with time it's only become more likely that those are the bounds. flu averages around 0.1% IFR, so likely 2-3X as deadly.

The current CDC "best estimate" is ~0.4%, assuming an R0 of 2.5, with estimates of ~0.2% if the R0 is actual ~2 in the US and ~1% if the R0 is actually 3.

Pretty sure that 0.4% is "among people who develop symptoms" and 35% of infections are asymptomatic. So 0.4% of 65% of infections, or ~0.26% of infections.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Thanks for the correction; everyone else, ignore what I wrote one post up.

(It's a shame HN doesn't support strike-through; that is my preferred way to retract a post without just deleting it in shame.)

No problem. This stuff is all very nuanced and rapidly changing. It's hard not to make a mistake.

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