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Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by joe_the_user on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:32PM (#22622052)
South Korea does exhaustive and they get a fatality rate of 1%. WHO gives 1% max + 20% needing hospitalization. The various cruise ships also give a good idea.

At the start, the "Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded" claim had plausibility. Now it needs to die in fire. This stuff has demonstrated it's qualities at scale and we need to get with it.

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by tomxor on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:44PM (#22622181)
> At the start, the "Many thousands of mildly symptomatic infections aren't recorded" claim had plausibility. Now it needs to die in fire.

Do you have an argument against this other than die in a fire? In the UK the government is literally advising people to NOT call the NHS if they suspect they are infected but stay home and self isolate unless they become severely ill and cannot cope. It's pretty reasonable to assume the denominator is much larger from this behaviour.

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by beaunative on Thursday March 19, 2020 @10:45PM (#22634105)
We don't need to take UK's number. There are whole pack of other countries using much more active methods to combat this virus.
Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by joe_the_user on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:57PM (#22622326)
The UK plan is insane and could result in massive deaths. But hopefully will just be rolled once the deaths begin.

You can read the discussion of the reasons to be pretty certain of the 1%+ fatality rate and how that's catastrophic on the rest of my thread and in more detail elsewhere. As to the UK plan, look here:

"I'm an epidemiologist, when I heard the UK plan, I thought it was satire":

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidem...

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by bosswipe on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:48PM (#22622231)
"I'm not an epidemiologist but" that South Korea number is misleading because it's calculated as death/"people that tested positive". That undercounts the death rate because some of the people that tested positive are still sick and might die. The correct formula is death/"closed cases" which takes into account only people that have recovered or died. That number in SK is currently around 5% though trending down as cases are closed. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore...
Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by joe_the_user on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:52PM (#22622268)
That's not quite right.

Your link shows the seriously ill among the unclosed cases as 59 people. If those dies, it won't increase the death significantly - maybe bump it to 1.5%.

But an increase to the base death rate doesn't matter. We should know a 1% death rate is going to be catastrophic and take action.

Edit: originally read you as arguing the death rate as too high so different argument. It's probably better to assume a higher death rate regardless anyway so I changed "you are wrong" to "not quite right" too.

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by foxyv on Thursday March 19, 2020 @10:41AM (#22627905)
Also need to take into account that people will die a long time before the cases close. Also not all cases will be closed because of limited testing. Right now the ratio of deaths to closed cases in the US is about 60:40

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by rstuart4133 on Saturday March 21, 2020 @08:24PM (#22651501)
I'm looking forward to the day when the dust has settled and I can see deaths/total population. To be useful it has to run its natural course, rather than being stopped by a vaccine.

The only out way is to test everybody in a large random sample. Even South Korea doesn't do that - people volunteer or a pushed to get tested. The end result is all testing to date has been done on the parts of population who are more likely to be feeling the effects of covid-19.

That skews everything. Even "every person infects 2.3 others" becomes suspect if there is a large reservoir of people out there who have it, are infectious but don't know it. Kids in particular, being the little germ bags they are, areseemingly mostly unaffected by it and so could be a huge vector.

Counting the dead after it's over is one way to by-pass that measurement problem. In Australia, a bad flu season kills 0.015% of the population. My gut feeling is we don't as yet have any idea where covid-19 will end up. Italy is currently sitting at 0.0083%, so they aren't up to the flu levels yet. The current overwhelming of the hospitals could be caused by an extraordinarily high infection rate coupled with it being very, very mild for most people, particularly kids. Or it could because it's as horrible as the media paints it. We simply don't know.

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by tanilama on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:38PM (#22622115)
Also noted, SK's infected populations are overwhelmingly skew towards young population during their 20s from the cult cluster.

This won't be the case for other countries. 1% is way too optimistic at this point.

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by nostromo on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:41PM (#22622169)
The Princess Cruise has nearly perfect data as everyone in a controlled population was tested. (This is not true for South Korea, which has tested less than half a percent of their population.)

The fatality rate was 0.8%. The majority of their passengers were over 60 years old, so even this number is too high compared to the global population.

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by joe_the_user on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:49PM (#22622233)
Yes, the Princess Cruise tells 0.8% might be the best case fatality rate with a functioning medical system.

Even that would be catastrophic for if the virus infects a large percentage of the population, as it is rapidly moving to do. Thus we cannot be even in the least bit sanguine on this and need to move with speed against it. This is in no way comparable to 2009 or other recent events (contrary to your ggp).

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by nostromo on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @07:07PM (#22622431)
As I mentioned, the cruise ship was full of old people, so no, it's not the best case scenario. It's likely the worst case scenario.
Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by joe_the_user on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @07:40PM (#22622685)
No, the worst case scenario is not medical system to help the people who become seriously ill, which 20%, according to WHO and multiple other authorities and statistics.
Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by joe_the_user on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:45PM (#22622200)
It doesn't matter if 1% is "optimistic" or not. 20% infection + 1% best-case fatality rate is enough to knock the health care system and begin knocking out the whole of society.

Basically, there's enough information currently to tell people who pay attention and consider rationally that we need to spend every possible effort confining infections and quarantining, basically the entire earth. There is no alternative.

Re:‘I’m not an epidemiologist but’: The rise of the corona i... by QuantumGood on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @09:01PM (#22623246)
Lots of smokers though