Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will last, health experts say

Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by treis on Friday April 03, 2020 @01:35PM (#22771946)

>No, the worst case scenario is much worse than that

It's really not. People just don't seem to grasp that the rates for positive cases are drastically different than the rates for people infected. We aren't doing nearly enough testing to catch even all the symptomatic cases let alone the asymptomatic and mild ones.

The infection fatality rate is almost certainly under 1% and not everyone will get infected even in the worst case.

>Not to mention 1/100 is enough for a lot of people to result in at least one person they know dying.

Only if we use a very broad definition of what "know" means.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by LorenPechtel on Friday April 03, 2020 @02:10PM (#22772342)

Look at parts of Italy--there are areas that have already had 1% of the population die. Note that most of these are not being reported as Covid-19 deaths (presumably because of the overload, they never got tested), we simply see it in excess mortality.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by treis on Friday April 03, 2020 @02:24PM (#22772492)

>Look at parts of Italy--there are areas that have already had 1% of the population die

Which parts are that?

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by mdemare on Friday April 03, 2020 @03:12PM (#22772982)

Nembro, Italy. Pop. 11000, 152 deaths. 1.38% of the population died. In March.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by sershe on Saturday April 04, 2020 @02:05AM (#22776519)

Isn't that the part of Italy where hospital collapse actually happened? And in the same article they conjecture they are now at ~herd immunity. And the demographics are skewed towards the elderly so again they themselves estimated the death rate being consistent with 1%, age-adjusted. And they counted ALL the surplus dead. This is an upper bound of the absolute worst case, as far as I can tell.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by mdemare on Saturday April 04, 2020 @08:06AM (#22777789)

Nobody there is going to die in April from covid?

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by sershe on Saturday April 04, 2020 @09:29PM (#22783022)

They are past the peak (again based on the info from the original article), so it doesn't seem likely the numbers will change a lot; not to the level of 6%/3%/other numbers being suggested in other sources.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by treis on Friday April 03, 2020 @05:42PM (#22774207)

A small town doesn't really count as a "part" of a country.

It's also probably just a statistical outlier. Even if the overall IFR is 0.5% you will see some areas with rates higher or lower than that from chance or their demographics.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by CydeWeys on Saturday April 04, 2020 @08:28AM (#22777863)

It's still early on in the pandemic. The vast majority of the people who will die from it still haven't yet. It's way too early to be putting ceilings on the overall death rate.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by LorenPechtel on Friday April 03, 2020 @04:19PM (#22773555)

I believe there are more examples, but that is one of them.

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Re:Americans are underestimating how long disruptions will l... by amanaplanacanal on Friday April 03, 2020 @02:01PM (#22772246)

You appear to be taking about the mortality rate when medical care is available. What is the rate after the hospitals are full?

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