Do you have citations for the “10X as fatal” comment? I am having a hard time understanding the situation because facts are hard to come by.

I edited my comment to remove the 10x claim. The fact is that the numbers are fluid right now and it's wrong to pull a figure out like that.

COVID-19 currently has a 3.4% case fatality ratio according to the WHO last week -

https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...

But this is in the middle of the pandemic and is likely to be revised downward as many cases are undiagnosed.

The 2009 H1N1 outbreak had a inital case fatality ratio of 0.4%, but revised downwards to 0.026% afterwards due to new evidence of more spread than thought -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8406723.stm

> COVID-19 currently has a 3.4% case fatality ratio according to the WHO last week -

This number will likely go down to below 1% because:

- S. Korea have implemented large scale tests on asymptomatic cases and their death rate is 0.77%

- the "Princess Diamond" cruise, which can be considered a closed experiment, has had a 1% death rate for people that were not ventilated

- in China if you exclude the Hubei province, the mortality rate is 0.88%

In Italy the mortality rate is 6% but the explanation is quite simple — they stopped testing asymptomatic cases, even people with fever are sent home without a test and instructed to return in case the fever doesn't go away in a few days and they are overwhelmed. At this point they are only admitting people that have trouble breathing.

And northern Italy has really good hospitals, so the only reasonable explanation for the huge disparity is that they have more than 10 times the reported total cases.

In other words, the virus has infected many more people than official numbers.

Remember that those "total cases" are cases that have been discovered via tests, it does not include people that stayed at home and weren't tested, either because the symptoms were too mild or because they were sent home.

“Princess Diamond” deaths are excluding people who died in their home countries that where infected on the cruse ship. They had 6 deaths as of February 28th and then excluded all future deaths and cases “cases found after disembarkation” from the total.

Edit: A Hong Kong national from the ship died on 6 March which is being included as the 7th death. So, this may simply be fragmented rather than explicit exclusions.

Are these stats not accurate?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

They are saying 7 deaths and 32 critical.

I don’t know about the cruse ship, but it seems like it’s double counting a death in Australia on both the cruse ship and an Australian death. I would double check the totals.

As far as I can tell Australia has 3 deaths including 1 from the cruse ship. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-08/coronavirus-related-d...

I really wish everyone was doing the random-sampling-of-general-population thing. Even if they could only do it on a fairly small scale, I suspect it'd give a much better picture of where we're really at than the "confirmed cases" floor.

“Likely to be revised downward”

This is the most dangerous misinformation I’ve heard spread about this disease, and it’s getting repeated everywhere.

There is no mountain of undiagnosed asymptomatic cases. It doesn’t exist.

WHO has looked. China has looked. South Korea has looked.

It’s not there. The mortality rate is presently 6.01% and fluctuating, making this virus about twice as deadly as the Spanish Flu

In S. Korea the mortality rate is 0.77%. In China outside of the Hubei provence where things have gotten out of control the mortality rate is 0.88%.

People in Italy are only admitted in hospitals if they have difficulty breathing by themselves. People that only have a fever or other mild symptoms are sent home, with no test administered. When the outbreak started they were testing asymptomatic cases, trying to be proactive in identifying infected people, but they stopped doing that once things have gotten out of control. And we will see this pattern repeating.

What's dangerous is spreading nonsense like a 6% death rate, which is factually not true.

I’m afraid it’s very much true.

South Korea have a lot of early stage cases in those numbers (haven’t died, haven’t recovered), and a very young population on the whole. An undetermined number of those cases will die rather than recover.

Multiple sources have looked for these large majorities of asymptomatic cases and did not find them. There is no evidence other than our collective hunches that these cases exist in significant numbers.

Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):

125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes

4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)

Not sure what the demographics of S. Korea is, whether they have a younger population or not, but it's irrelevant.

At least 80%-85% of all Covid-2019 cases have mild symptoms. We are not talking about completely asymptomatic cases, we are talking about a majority of cases that could pass for a mere cold or flu.

Many of those will not go to a hospital or be tested, especially if the system is overwhelmed.

Italy could easily have more than 10 times the number of reported cases because they stopped testing proactively. Only people with difficulty breathing are now tested and these represent a small minority of cases.

I gave S.Korea as an example because AFAIK they are the only ones doing large scale testing of the population and they aren't China (whom we may or may not trust to be transparent).

The data we have points to a mortality rate that's less than 1%.

When you see a mortally greater than that it is because people aren't tested unless they reach the ICU.

A couple of things I’m not sure are correct there though.

The 80-85% mild cases comes from confirmed cases that we know about. They’re included in the current 6.45% death rate from the JH data.

China may or may not be transparent, but if they have an incentive to hide anything, it would be a higher death rate rather than a lower one.

The data is the data. In any case it’s now global and the 6.45% is actually higher than it was before the virus started growing exponentially outside of China (it was 5.7% from this dataset then).

It's been estimated to be between 2 and 3% for at least a month now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Epide...

The mortality rate is presently 6.01% and fluctuating, making this virus about twice as deadly as the Spanish Flu.

As this is being downvoted, the math I’m using is below.

Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this): 125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes 4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)

Those numbers aren't terribly useful since so many cases are mild or even asymptomatic. Most organizations are estimating 2-3% mortality, and are quick to point out that this is probably an overestimation due to the lack of testing in asymptomatic individuals.

Basically we are counting every case severe enough to cause death, but only some of the cases that aren't very severe, and that latter group is already a much bigger piece of the pie even among confirmed cases.

That Wiki link would serve as a citation.

The table in the "comparisons to other pandemics and epidemics" section gives a point estimate for the case fatality rate of 0.03%. If we assume that the final rate for covid-19 is somewhere in the 1-2% range that's what I last heard, that would mean that "10X as fatal" is an understatement - more like 30-70x as fatal.

About 240x as fatal.

The mortality rate is presently 6.01% and fluctuating, making this virus about twice as deadly as the Spanish Flu.

You've claimed this three times already. Do you have a substantiating link? Furthermore, saying "six point oh one percent" instead of just "approximately six percent" gives a false air of precision that could not possibly hold -- even you admit the estimate is still in flux.

At the risk of compounding the problem of having posted this in several places, copying into this reply:

Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):

125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes 4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)

NIH director quoted 10x as fatal today.

Data from the China CDC suggests 20x as fatal: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-flu-...

go to /r/covid19 - it's one of the highest SNR about this clusterf* on the wide internet. plenty of CFR (case fatality ratio) estimation papers there.