Yes, this doesn’t tell you what happens with less than ideal care (higher fatality rates), or under different populations (lower fatality rates) but it’s a world of difference from the 10% fatality rates being tossed around elsewhere in this thread.
4/800 = 0.5%. And if you accept the very reasonable likelihood that actually everyone on the ship was exposed, 4/3700 = 0.1%.
I agree.
I misspoke when I said very little. I was taking issue with the OPs assertion that 0.5% was a best case mortality rate. I should have said it's closer to an upper bound assuming ideal treatment, since it looks like this is much worse for the elderly.
One thing that's puzzling to me though is even though the infected rate from the diamond princess is reported at 700+, the recovery rate is still reported at 10+. So what's going on with the other 690+ people? Are they still sick in a way they could still deteriorate? It's confusing because the cfr based on dead and recovered is still pretty high.
Again, though, the diamond princess is helping to clarify things, because nonreporting and nonpresenting aren't issues for the most part.
There are around 400,000 deaths from flu globally, every year. (The numbers vary by quite a bit.) And that's after vaccination efforts.
So far I'm seeing no evidence to persuade me this is significantly deadlier. Everything that has been said about COVID-19 - the stress on healthcare, and so on - has already been happening during flu waves. For decades.
The real difference is the scale of the response. Flu's effect on the economy is a little more than a rounding error, but not by much.
Because of the measures taken, this is likely to have very significant negative economic and social effects which will last far longer than the danger of infection.
No, it makes it about 5x worse than a typical flu season (10x worse than what America is seeing this year).
Of course, within the population of old people, I would expect cruise goers to be relativly healthy; so I would expect this population to be more vulnerable then the general public, but less vulnerable then their age based demographics.
This also should be read with the context that cruise ship passengers tend to be older.
Also, that number will climb a bit.
The biggest risk isn't the bare mortality rate when properly treated, but the actual mortality rate when the healthcare system is loaded to capacity and there are additional patients to handle. And since the worst patients end up in respirators for a week or more... Well, it makes the problem of load balancing keepalives very literal.