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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

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LatteLazy·

2.5% death rate here in England.

112k deaths from 4.4m cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_England

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2.5% is not accurate. 4.4 million confirmed UK cases. It's widely known that a large number of cases were never reported/confirmed.

Op says the death rate is 0.02%.

We have a whole bunch of figures for the death count, all around or above 112k but let's take the much lower 85k excess deaths for just 2020 [0]

85k / 0.0002 would mean 425 million people had had covid in England. England only has 55 million people.

[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1137

If you don't like my number, please suggest your own. But anyone saying 99.98% survive is being silly.

600k excess deaths in the US, which is 0.02% of the 328 million population - ie, 99.98% of the us population survived the virus in 2020. Is it silly ?

Edit : it is, my bad, added a zero. It should read 0.2%, not 0.02%.

Another way to look at it is that in January, when things were worst, weekly deaths from everything were about 50% higher than "normal" for 2015-19.

That's not precisely the same as covid-19 deaths, nor does it represent the whole of 2020, but it's pretty staggering and suggests what would happen if it was left untreated.

Errrrr you do know you don't count people who haven't had the virus in survival rates, right? If they haven't had it, they haven't survived it.

There's also the discrepancy that the UK counts deaths within 28 days of a covid diagnosis. So while it's statistically likely that most people did die due to covid, some won't have

I wonder how much those two even out

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