> Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) = probability of dying if infected by the virus (%).

Nonsense! Unless we can count every death caused by the virus, and correctly diagnose every infection, then this is a ridiculous (and irresponsible) guess. The number for "all cases" comes from the CCDC paper:

> A total of 72,314 patient records—44,672 (61.8%) confirmed cases, 16,186 (22.4%) suspected cases, 10,567 (14.6%) clinically diagnosed cases (Hubei Province only), and 889 asymptomatic cases (1.2%)—contributed data for the analysis.

Another more recent study guesses that 86% of cases are asymptomatic and/or otherwise undocumented:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/scie...

Yeah, it's almost certainly way overblown. People are freaking out over a bad flu season. I could see a case made in a future retrospective that the exponential increase we're seeing in cases is actually an exponential increase in the number of available tests disseminated.

Until we have antibody tests, the PCR-based tests we're using will only tell us if you actively have the disease not if you had it ages ago and already recovered. This disease could have easily spread unnoticed (due to the overwhelmingly mild flulike symptoms most people get) for months. Due to its highly-contageous nature, it probably did.

Until we calm down and analyze what all actually happened my guess is just as good as anyone else.

With modern genomic science, we can pinpoint almost the exact time and place Covid-19 jumped from an animal host (likely pangolins intermediate host from bat reservoir) to humans.

It almost certainly jumped hosts to humans in November of 2019[1]. It has not been circulating in humans for long.

Indeed, several scientific publications have come out in the past decade that more or less predicted that a similar strain of SARS would jump hosts and become a pandemic disease[2].

Also, technically the Spanish Flu was just a bad flu season, right? Now, few believe now that Covid-19 will be nearly as bad as the 1918 pandemic (at least in its current mutation), but it will almost certainly worse than the 1957 flu pandemic, which was bad enough and which resulted in many governmental edicts similar to today, with many school and library closings.

I agree we need to keep cool and not overreact or panic, but we also need to take this thing very seriously. Even the experts are trying to figure this thing out. Disease modeling has come a long way since 1918, but modelers are not seers.

1. https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/24/dna-sleuths-read-coronav...

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/educational-magazines/inf...

Right now tests are being allocated to critically ill or dead people suspected of Covid-19. Ideally most cause of deaths are caught so the absolute number of deaths are a decent indicator of spread, but they are lagged by probably 7-14 days or the time until critical + testing and reporting time.

Also I am 32yo male on day 5 of Covid-19 symptoms and have hopefully been through the worst part (immune response in lungs). AMA.

AMA: Was it any different than a bad flu for you?

After a week long light dry cough, it was rapid onset and more resperatory/lung focused kind of immune response, almost like a lung infection. The acronyms SARS is a pretty good description.

Basically I think it slowly invades your lungs but finally your immune system figures it out and goes all-in. What triggered it was some vigorous excersize which wiped me out. I call that day 1 but it was after over a week of the cough. Day 1-2 occasionnaly had a 99.0F fever but often lower/normal. Had two nights where I felt congestion developing in lungs and then third day got to 100.8F at 5pm... that night-BAM-woke up at 4am with cold sweats and a strong even burning in both lungs (probably immune system working on it). Lungs felt raw breathing in air. Turned on the shower to get some humidity and the burning subsided but then lungs started swelling up and breathing difficulties began. Luckily I took a bunch of benedryl and was able to breathe more after an hour of calm, but was close to calling ambulance. After that I've now had one OK night with a lot of localizing immune activity but at a lower level. On a scale from feeling lousy (1) to dead (10) the progression each night was 1,2,5,2.. (and hopefully continuing down..).

Get well soon, and thank you for sharing!

Do you have any underlying health conditions?

No I'm super healthy, 32 yr old, competitive runner.

I have a suspicion that I may have had it even longer than a week in advance and it spread more in the lungs than normal.

today is a 2.5

it kind of sucks, do your best to avoid it.

I had the worst cold around christmas and it really does make me wonder.

Fever, body aches for a couple days. Felt like I was going to cough up a lung.

but no real sneezing or congestion.

This is one of the few cases where the raw data is so systematically flawed - many younger people are completely asymptomatic or not being tested because they don't need hospitalization - the anecdata might give you a better picture of the relative risk.

The youngest of the UK's >100 confirmed COVID-19 fatalities was in his forties and already terminally ill. Young people aren't totally safe and should certainly avoid contracting it if possible with a view to protecting the people they come into contact with and not taking up a hospital bed if they're at the unlucky end of the spectrum, but relatively speaking they're a tiny fraction of the overall casualties, and probably have more exposure to the virus than the elderly due to more active social/work lives.

Not to disagree with anything you said here, but there was recently a story comparing the fates of two young Chinese medical workers who both contracted the disease and who required medical care. The punchline is that a 29-year old physician with no co-morbidities died a terrible death. Be careful out there no matter your age or health status.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/co...

This guy is pretty clearly an outlier (or there is some missing information).

In Italy only 5 people under 40 have died, out of approx. 2500 deaths so far, and every one of the 5 had an existing serious illness.

"Didn't die" is not the same as "was not harmed".

This relentless focus only on the people who died misses the point: covid-19 puts people in hospital, sometimes into intensive care, and many of those people end up with damaged lungs.

Yeah, I've been reading this all over HN, and saw a few articles out of China at the peak there, but have struggled to find good sources on the prevalence of it elsewhere. In particular, there's a lot of data coming out of Italy but very little that I've found mentions long-term lung damage. Could you share your sources?

Survive yes. But half the patients in intensive care in Holland and France are in the 30 to 60 age bracket. And we don’t know yet what the longterm damage is after you survive.

Not to mention that survival rates start to go down as the medical establishment succumbs to the strain. I'm isolating myself as much as possible and engaging in rather stringent protocols (N95 mask and gloves while out/ disrobe, wash clothes, and bathe on return), with the goal of staving off contraction until Fall if at all possible. Maybe the Chloroquine research will prove effective by then.

I'm in Kirkland/Redmond, so the risk is higher here than elsewhere at the moment.

For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country. That's why governments are finally admitting "Herd Immunity/Flatten the Curve" without total containment is not an option.

> For comparison, the death rate across all age groups of flu is 0.1%. Extrapolating out, a failure to contain the virus will still mean tens of thousands of young healthy people dying in every country.

I’m not sure why you’re comparing the all-age mortality of flu to the age-specific mortality of COVID-19.

The relevant metric would be about 0.02% [1]

1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

Why not? It's just giving some context to people who may think .2% is a "low" mortality rate.

Thanks for the age specific number. That shows my point even more.

Ah, I wasn't sure what point you were trying to make, but I thought the all-age figure understates how much more deadly COVID-19 is compared to influenza.

Flat statements about what strategies are or aren't options don't seem helpful. It's not a good option, ideally we'll have total containment, but it's important that we not see it as a betrayal if it's decided in a couple weeks that total containment isn't feasible.

It absolutely would be a betrayal of the people you'd be giving up on to not do everything we can to help them while we still can. You can advocate for or against taking strong action but you can't tell people you're allowing to die to not be upset about it.

You certainly can't tell people not to be upset! Every death is tragedy; people have a right to be upset even about rarer causes of death that are harder to mitigate. (From personal experience, I can tell you that anyone who's seen an alcoholic family member die learns to sympathize with the Prohibitionists.)

But it's not a betrayal to acknowledge their pain while recognizing nothing feasible can be done.