We all assume that this is so (and I hope it is), but this is not completely clear. It might be that for covid-19, help from the medical system doesn't matter much, given our current state of medical knowledge and care. And iatrogenic harm cannot be discounted. Certainly we cannot ethically run the experiment.
As a single anecdatum, there was a (BBC?) piece on a hospital in the worst Italian region, showing a number of people on ventilators. The narrator explained that the staff was demoralized by the fact that everyone they had put on a ventilator died anyway.
And also, we should hope that proper triage will mean that the non-coronavirus emergencies that matter will indeed be allocated a bed, etc.
I have little doubt that this will be awful, but the counterfactual scenarios are difficult to evaluate.
Edit: CCP comrades downvoting this, here's how "zero new cases" is being achieved in your country: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/fosodi/covi...
That said, the no new cases sure does sound like bullshit.
As does 50-60 cases a day per 1.5 billion people when your test accuracy is pretty much a random number generator (as Spain has unfortunately found out when they received Chinese tests). I'd have a much easier time believing 5-7K new cases per day. For China that'd be the same as 1K per day for the US, which for us would be not an issue at all, if it kept steady.
it doesn't matter what the IFR (infection fatality rate, usually impossible to know exactly) is. what really matters is how many people will end up in hospitals at the same time in absolute terms. after the first wave passes, it is important to know how many people are now immune to plan lockdowns and health care capacity for the second and future waves - but this again isn't related to fatality rates, but hospitalization rates and true R0 (maybe there were much more people infected who didn't even know they had it than we think).
If the medical system starts to fail it's not just COVID-19 you get to worry about, if the incapacity rate is high enough you get to start worrying about things like: how long will it take for my electricity to get fixed, how long will my heat be out for, where's the food for the local supermarket, when will my pharmacy get my prescriptions in stock, etc. Second order effects start getting noticeable quick in a society as connected and just in timed as ours.
Most first world countries have hardened, resilient, and distributed infrastructure that takes little resources to maintain. The more your economy revolves around non-essential goods and services, the more headroom there is for dealing with failure.
The second order effects of breakdowns in supply chain are real. But they are most effectively dealt with by JIT and connectivity. The US is changing significant parts of it’s economy to deal with this shock: and it looks to be effectively redeploying resources without any leadership at the top.
Look historically at whole countries hit by war or disaster, and see how they managed.
Imagine if tomorrow all medicines are unavailable, and all hospitals destroyed? Many people would die, but the vast majority of the economy would keep running and the vast majority of citizens would remain healthy. Sure, we all could have stocked up on some resources better, but there are heavy costs associated with over stocking and over planning.
3,800 patients, or 12% of case in NY were hospitalized as of today. 888 require intensive care. [0]
You're right about approx 1% fatality rate though. And this is NYC the epicenter of the pandemic in the US.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
Based on my research, it actually seems like fatality rate will NOT skyrocket if our medical system is overwhelmed like in Italy.
Here is an actual study that looks at fatality rates in Italy vs China after stratifying by age group: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763667
The most eye-opening graphic is the first chart. To summarize the article:
1) Italy's fatality rate for patients younger than 60 is actually better than China
2) Italy's fatality rate for patients older than 60 is less than double that of China
3) Italy may have a higher rate of pre-existing conditions which makes fatality rate look worse than it is
4) Italy is only testing symptomatic patients which makes fatality rate look worse than it is
All of these results were surprising to me. The information being spread by the mainstream media suggests that if hospital systems get overwhelmed like they have in Italy, fatality rate will skyrocket.
In reality, it seems like we're dealing with a classic case of Simpson's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox). If you stratify data by age group, you find that even if hospital systems are overwhelmed (to the same degree as Italy), fatality rates will, at most, double.
The amount of people that need medical care caused by this virus should also be taken into account. And that rate is high.
While not a direct fatality of the viruses, these cases should be estimated to see its total mortality impact.
There is no Antibody/serological/immunity test yet. Biologically it is harder even that a vaccine... Test WILL be intensive/invasive (think blood, not mucus), much more so than a simple test for presence/absence of a particular virus.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-immune...
Important though
I 100% agree that we should be running antibody tests to see how many people have caught COVID-19 and recovered. All of our testing until recently was based on RNA tests, which may only be positive during a relatively short window. (I saw a case study claiming that even some hospitalized patients are testing negative inside 7 days.) We need to know how many people catch this and beat it quickly.
That said, even in populations that have been RNA-tested early and extensively (such as the Diamond Princess and South Korea), the number of completely asymptomatic cases is less than 50%. Using the most optimistic data, I personally have less than a 0.5% chance of dying assuming I get all the medical care I need.
And that's the problem. This virus hospitalizes about 20% of identified cases. They require some supplemental oxygen, and maybe an IV. With good care, probably less than 1% die.
So there are really two key fatality rates:
1. How many people die if they get all the care they need, and
2. How many people die if 30+% of the population catches this at the same time?
Even if we're overestimating (1) by a factor of 10, that's still enough to make (2) catastrophic. What happened in Wuhan and Lombardy can happen here, and there's absolutely no reason that it couldn't get 10x worse. Even if we're overestimating the disease.
So let's start testing aggressively for antibodies. Until we get that number, I'm all for extreme caution.