50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

Re:50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic by piokoch on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @05:39AM (#22603221)

In Italy more than 300 people die every day, the overall mortality rate is between 3% and 8% this is 10 times more than 0.4%. Even if 50%-75% are asymptomatic, there is still large percentage of critical cases that need ICU treatment and currently we are not prepared for it.

For me the title should be 25% of cases require treatment in hospital and we are not able to put 25% of population into hospitals, so, very likely 3%-8% will have to die (3% - WHO estimate, 8% - real numbers we have for now).

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Re:50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic by neuronic on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @05:50AM (#22603290)

That's assuming that all reported cases make up all ACTUAL cases. This is likely completely wrong. What if a much much larger chunk of Italy is already infected and simply not showing symptoms? You would never get permission for a test.

Estimates, I found them on Germany's top Robert Koch Institute website [1], suggest that Wuhan underreported cases by a factor between 4.5x and 11.1x (3 separate studies with different factors).

[1] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

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Re:50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic by notahacker on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @06:03AM (#22603367)

I don't think anyone knowledgeable is assuming reported cases make up all or even a significant proportion of infected cases (I myself am in recovery from moderate lung inflammation which is probably COVID-19, but even with very-obviously-not-regular-flu symptoms don't figure in my country's stats because tests are reserved for those requiring hospitalisation)

Even if it was actually the case that nearly everyone in Italy had it in which case the casualty rates would be much lower than current estimates, the proportion of cases needing ventilators is sufficiently high to overload Italy's healthcare system (so the risk is similar, we're just looking at different risk factors i.e. the disease being less deadly but much more efficient at spreading than current estimates). Knowing that would make it easier to shift from containment to building more ventilators as a strategy, I guess

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Re:50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic by WalterSear on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @12:48PM (#22606887)

> I don't think anyone knowledgeable is assuming reported cases make up all or even a significant proportion of infected cases

The WHO explicitly and repeatedly asserted exactly that.

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Re:50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic by lostapathy on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @01:12PM (#22607240)

Surely the amount of symptomatic but untested people in Italy is high. If you're sick but readily able to manage the symptoms, and you're already under lockdown because the health system is overloaded, you're not going to bother going in to get tested - you're going to let the doctors work on the people who need it.

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Re:50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic by ramblerman on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @09:50AM (#22604829)

> For me the title should be 25% of cases require treatment in hospital

The opposite of "completely asymptomatic" is not requires hospital.

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