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Comment by drited | Hacker News Reader

>marginally lower case fatality rate

The op didn't state marginally could you please share where you are getting this from?

The first publicly confirmed death globally from Omicron was reported just yesterday (source: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spread...

Given that the South African study discussed in this Washington Post article included 78k people, none of whom died if the above Reuters article is correct, doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?

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It's growing exponentially and deaths are a lagging indicator. The true denominator is far from 78k people.

I know deaths lag cases. I mentioned just the cases in the south African study because those are the earliest cases we have. None of the 78,000 cases up to 7th Dec in South Africa resulted in a reported death up to 13th Dec.

This can be deduced from yesterday's Reuters article I linked which said the first reported death globally was in the UK (not South Africa) and from the fact that the study looked at 78,000 cases of Omicron from 15 November 2021 to 7 December 2021 (source: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room). At the time the Reuters article was published we were 6 days after even the most recently reported of those South African cases.

I wasn't trying to present the global denominator - that is far higher than 78,000 since it includes all countries, not just the 78k reported in the South African country.

> None of the 78,000 cases up to 7th Dec in South Africa resulted in a reported death up to 13th Dec.

Covid takes about 3 weeks to kill. The Omicron epicenter in SA has a much younger demographic than in western countries.

Pretty much every estimate of exponential growth has turned out to be logarithmic. Which makes sense. That’s how % of new nodes reached in a random walk through a graph works.

> The first publicly confirmed death globally from Omicron was reported just yesterday

With Omicron, not from Omicron. It's an important distinction.

The headline says "with" and the first bullet point says "from". The first paragraph says

"the first publicly confirmed death globally from the swiftly spreading strain"

And the next paragraph says "Britain gave no details on the death other than the person had been diagnosed in hospital."

However I wasn't referring to the news article but actual statements from UK government ministers and health officials' failure to be specific when questioned. For all we know the person was hit by a bus.

If the person was hit by a bus or died from a cause other than Omicron then that would strengthen the point I was making in the post you replied to which was

>>doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?

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