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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"99.99% survival rate"

If it had a 99.99% survival rate, it would mean only 1 out of 10,000 people infected with COVID-19 died.

200k people in the US have died of COVID-19. Mulitply 200k deaths by 10,000 and you get 2 billion people in the US infected with COVID-19. The US has a population of only about 330 million.

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> population of 330k

99.9% would have been more precise, which aligns well with the current numbers.

The term "survival rate" applies to the infected, not the entire population. When a plane wipes out against a mountain in the Andes, you don't use the population of the entire country to claim that the survival rate of the crash was high, you count only the people who were actually in the plane.

So 209,454 deaths suggests a 96% survival rate[0], based on our current information.

Perhaps more to the point, since humans are generally bad at visualizing statistics, 209,454 people have died, making COVID-19 the third-highest cause of death[1] in the USA this year so far.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[1] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200818/covid-the-third-lea...

Survival rate = 1-Ifr. Ifr is ~0.1% so 99.9% is right. There were no 200k corona deaths in the US.

There have been more than 200k deaths from COVID-19, and the year is not yet over. I linked to information supporting the number I gave.

I actually think the number is a bit higher, since not all deaths triggered by COVID-19 are necessarily reported with COVID-19 as a comorbidity[0]. But there are certainly not fewer!

[0] https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/09/01/comorbidities-and-coronavirus...

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