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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

With a death rate among confirmed cases approaching 10% at its peak, and not enough attention in the USA being paid to safety measures, can you really blame them for sensationalizing it?

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Among confirmed cases is a confusing metric since at first only the most severe patients were tested.

For context the IFR is reported by the cdc at .26%

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

Raw number says 0.026. isn't it 2.6% rather than 0.26% ?

Go to table 1 and look at best estimate overall. It’s .004

This is the CFR which is higher. If you consider their projection that 35% of all infected cases remain asymptomatic, the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) drops to just 0.26 %.

If their estimate this week of over 20mm true infections is accurate then the coronavirus has an IFR of 0.6% in the US. Comparatively the 2017-2018 flu season was fairly bad and saw 61k deaths from an estimated 45mm infections[1] for an IFR of about 0.15%. So this is about four times worse than a bad flu season, with significant skew towards far more risk for older people.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html?CDC_AA_refVa...

Interesting point. It makes we wonder if we used years lost (not sure what the correct term is) how it would compare to the flu. Since it scews elderly.

A ton of attention initially was given to safety (I mean large swaths of the country shut down and there’s plenty of business that still hasn’t reopened) however the sensationalist media is obviously sensational and people know it. Now instead of safety people, regular Joes, are thumbing their noses refusing to wear masks and otherwise just doing whatever because it looks like a big sham precisely because of the sensationalism.

It may seem sensational because everything was happening in New York.

Regular Joe's are funny if you tell them they can't wear a mask they would wear one.

The divide feels age related. People are going to die over it.

It seems sensational because the media has purposely done so just like this NYT headline. It’s almost as sensational as saying “people are going to die over it.” Of course they are. They already have.

The death rate is misleading since the worst rate was in places with poor testing near the breakout of the pandemic. Those who do die, die quicker than recoveries take to be confirmed.

The more info we get, the more it looks like the real death rate is 1-2%.

Which is pretty terrifying to me!

CDC says the IFR is .26%.

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

Nice.

So about 1 person for every 400 infected. It also implies we are about 1/8 of the way from the maximum number of posible fatalities in the US.

It’s a skewed distribution based on age. No age group has a death rate of 10%

He said among ‘confirmed cases’ which was true for a long time as they weren’t testing asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people.

My statement holds. The average death rate among confirmed cases may be 10%, but no well stratified group actually conforms to that rate.

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