More than half that cruise ship was older than 60. All the deaths on the ship attributed to coronavirus were people above 70 years old.

https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_crui...

Totally agree. That’s the number I’ve been watching most to get a sense of how many total are infected for different regions e.g. 1 death today = 50-200 people were infected 2 weeks ago.

Applied to US data... 21 deaths today. 14% daily increase, doubling time of 5.2 days (2 week lag; hopefully social distancing has lengthened it since then). Assuming 1% fatality, that would mean 2100 "actual" cases two weeks ago. Assume no social distancing and doubling time of 5.2 days, or say it doubled three times in two weeks and you get 16,800 cases today. But we've already got 11k confirmed cases today, and I can't believe our confirmed count has already caught up that much.

I dunno, maybe that's an indication that the fatality rate is lower than 1%. Or that dying takes longer than 14 days.

Then once you have 2 weeks of death data you can't get the transmission rate. Finally you could go to Seattle and sample 50k people to see how many were infected with a serology test to further refine the 1% assumption

What if many of the passengers who tested negative on the Diamond Princess had it and had already recovered when they tested negative?

This is considered in the article I posted.

South Korea went over 1% fatality yesterday, and they're seeing a rise in numbers again... they might not be testing enough either, so natural fatality could still be lower. (Maybe they should have shut down for two weeks.)

Aren't cruise ships generally an older crowd?

Cruise ships have a lot in the 40-60 range.

This gives them a higher median than the general population, but a lower density of the truly old. And deaths are strongly clustered among the truly old.

Yes, they're basically floating nursing homes doubling as casinos.