Re:Open-source “pandemic ventilator”
by eveningcoffee on Sunday March 01, 2020 @06:23AM
(#22456400)
It looks to me that there is probably a threshold of patients (different for each country) from which the mortality starts to rise.
Reasons behind this might be either institutional or purely statistical that is it might be possible that each country can keep alive at least certain number of critical patients and starts to fail when certain number is exceeded and it is possible that smaller number of patients are not representative enough and do not contain high risk patients (elderly, people with other chronic illness etc).
If you look at the recent data then when number of patients approaches 100 then mortality (CFR) exceeds 2%. Only exception seems to be South-Korea. Diamond Princess is not representative because patients are now evacuated and counted under their countries statistics.
From what I've read (see below), the current consensus is that China is under-reporting total infected, possibly by an order of magnitude. China also made several missteps in their initial and ongoing response that is likely increasing their mortality rate, especially in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei. Worldwide, there certainly are and will be people who are infected but are asymptomatic, and don't even know (and of course aren't being counted at all).
I would expect that the mortality rate outside China is -- and will stay -- sub-1%, unless it mutates and becomes more deadly, or if health services eventually become overwhelmed due to quick spread. Analysis of primary data seems to indicate that even non-Hubei China has a mortality rate around 0.7%; Hubei's mortality rate is skewing the total upward by a lot. Rest-of-world looks to be around 0.6% so far.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/19/health/coronavirus-china-sars...
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m606
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 (primary data, which links to some analysis and visualizations)