0.3% of the New York City population has already died of corona-virus. So assuming everyone in New York was infected that gives us an IFR of .3%. But if a more realistic 20% of the population was infected then the IFR could be as high as 1.5%.
I tried going through all the most recent research and almost all of it came up with an IFR in the 0.5-1.2% range. And the few that had a lower rate were looking at anti-body tests in places with very low base rates.
I would find that hard to believe and I also doubt they would have enough data to validate that type of hypothesis. We're still guessing at the number of people infected, not to mention how old are they, what pre-existing conditions did they have, how do those pre-existing condition affect Covid-19 mortality in different age groups, what viral load did they receive, etc..
Perhaps a better way to frame it would be - 2% (?) of patients have serious life-changing consequences. Those under 49 tend to survive them.
A local, healthy 8 year old girl started having symptoms last week Thursday and died the following Tuesday.
I don't expect my family's lockdown to end before well into next year at the earliest. The odds are against dying or long term complications for younger people, but is going out to dinner, a bar, sporting or music event worth the risk? Not for me. Stay safe folks.
So far it looks like these are the absolute exception, but it does sadly happen that young healthy people and kids too get seriously sick and sometimes even die.
The German pediatric association publishes some (incomplete) stats about the disease in children (https://dgpi.de/covid-19-survey-update-kw22/) and there were so far 159 hospitalizations, with 21 of those in intensive care. 140 kids were released, 1 died. ~9600 <19yos registered as sick with COVID.
In any case I agree that the topic COVID and children is particularly sensitive and still blurry right now.
This is a much more interesting data point.
Death tends to have very few ongoing life-altering consequences, and in and of itself has a very low R0.
1.0% in Brazil based on 25,025 samples https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1267670267624476672
1.14% in Spain based on 60,897 samples https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1265405628853305345
0.92% in NYC and 0.84% in New York State based on 15,101 samples https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1267669314657611777
Also YYG, the guy who runs https://covid19-projections.com/ (a model that has consistently produced the most accurate forecasts) reported his model found that a ~1% IFR gave the best fit: https://mobile.twitter.com/youyanggu/status/1256051255253757...
Note: S-IFR is the fatality of symptomatic cases only. IFR is the fatality of all cases (asymptomatic and symptomatic)
I am also starting to hear some noise that there might be cross immunity between this virus and previous coronavirus. In a recent video Prof Raoult was suggesting it might explain the low infection rate of people under 20 [1]. I am not qualified to tell whether the theory has any leg but it may be that we underestimate the spread of the virus when looking at a specific antibody.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=734&v=zUbiYhknaK... (in french)
15740 deaths ÷ 2700000 infected = 0.58% (they round to 0.5%)
However they note that the official state death count (15740 deaths) «only indicates deaths that happened in a hospital or a nursing home, and does not include coronavirus-related deaths that occurred in a home, which means the official death count is likely higher than that official number»
The true number of deaths, including home deaths, is 20759 as of the date of Cuomo's press briefing, April 24 (source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/mast...)
Furthermore, all the figures quoted by Cuomo were provisional, mid-study. The serosurvey actually completed on April 28 and was published here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.25.20113050v... The final figures as of this date were:
22777 deaths ÷ (19450000 state population × 14.0% infected) = IFR of 0.84%
It is important to take deaths as of April 28 in order to minimize right censoring.
«Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering patients to nursing home»
Spain and Brazil did not do this and still exhibit an IFR of 1% add per the serosurveys I referenced.
Isn't the death rate the percentage of population that dies when all are infected? Then nothing can be "exacerbated" by that alone? It then just reflects the death rate which results from the people being infected, no matter the speed?
To get the rate one can indeed calculate it with smaller representative sample, but that just doesn't imply that the vulnerable people would somehow never become infected if the epidemic continues, so the deaths of the old can't be avoided then. That the old die much more is a fact, and nothing that by itself "exacerbates" the rate.
Edit: I haven't seen any argument that estimated more than 20% of NY population that were supposedly infected were somehow specially skewed sample to hit only old people, and I'd argue that if the sample is that big it's quite improbable. If the argument is that the virus got faster in the nursing homes, one can also argue that all the old people outside of nursing homes skewed in the another direction by managing to initially not get the infection, but that as epidemic progresses they would indeed eventually become infected and suffer.
Edit2: "the virus is rather showing signs of going away" claim is very curious to me. I don't see it "going away" looking at all the statistics across the different parts of the world. I see only the slowdown of the spread, which corresponds to people generally changing their behavior to slow it down.
If it is the case, you don't expect the same death rate to scale up as the wider population continues to get infected (if it is still happening, the virus is rather showing signs of going away).
I verified that claim:
We know that the antibody tests in NYC gave the estimate of "all infected" of 20% of all. But there were around 20K deaths, and NYC has 8.3M population. Also even if we expect that the spread will stop once the 70% of population is infected the result is: 100e3 * 0.7 / 8e6 = 0.87%
Still much more than 0.4%. That it's closer to 1% matches all the statistics of the countries of the world that did a lot of testing compared to the number of cases and deaths.
Back to the article:
Bergstrom in the article: "Given that these parameter sets underestimate fatality by a substantial margin compared to current scientific consensus, this is deeply problematic."
In the same article, even CDC disclaims that their numbers are predictions:
"The scenarios are intended to advance public health preparedness and planning. They are not predictions or estimates of the expected impact of COVID-19" the CDC says.
So it seems you intentionally misinterpret CDC, given that it's all in the very article you linked.
"The fifth scenario is the CDC's "current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." In that scenario, the agency described its estimate that 0.4% of people who feel sick with Covid-19 will die.
For people age 65 and older, the CDC puts that number at 1.3%. For people 49 and under, the agency estimated that 0.05% of symptomatic people will die."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/health/cdc-coronavirus-estima...