
Mortality Rate of Covid-19 Is 0.5%, Much Lower Than CDC / WHO Claims - haidut
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-outbreak-diamond-princess-cruise-ship-death-rate
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dang
Editorialized titles like that break the HN guidelines: " _Please use the
original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
haidut
I get your point, but what my title says is exactly what the quote from the
popular press article states. See my own comment to my post towards the end of
the comments list in this thread. I did not come up with this title out of
nowhere or to make clickbait-y.

~~~
dang
I get that, and you're right that using language from the article itself is
far better than making up something of your own. Still, the guidelines ask you
not to rewrite titles unless they're misleading or linkbait. Cherry-picking a
detail from an article and making that the title is editorializing—in fact
it's the leading form of editorializing.

Titles are by far the most powerful influence on HN threads. The one who
controls the title controls the discussion, and on HN we want that control to
go not to the submitter, but to the article itself—except when it's abusing it
by being misleading or linkbait. In that case, changing the title is
necessary, and then it's best to find the most representative language in the
article (which might be a subheading, the URL, the HTML doc title, a photo
caption, or a factual sentence from the main text) and make that the title
instead.

On HN, submitting an article confers no extra right to frame the article for
everyone else. If you want to say what you think is important about an
article, that's great, but please do so via a comment in the thread. That way
your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's.

I've posted a lot about this in the past if you or anyone wants further
explanation:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22level%20playing%20field%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20editorializing&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20special%20right%20submit&sort=byDate&type=comment)

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robocat
Good study, badly analysed IMHO.

If we presume the virus was still in exponential mode, then the 328 not
showing symptoms could easily be those that had only just caught the virus.

Also you need to know the age distribution before trying to extrapolate rates
to normal populations.

“As of February 20, tests of most of the 3,711 people aboard the Diamond
Princess confirmed that 634, or 17 percent, had the virus; 328 of them did not
have symptoms at the time of diagnosis. Of those with symptoms, the fatality
ratio was 1.9 percent”

Edit: here’s the study:
[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v2.full.pdf)

I think “quarantined” was not individually quarantined, but that the ship as a
whole was quarantined.

ONE SURPRISING THING: high ratio of asymptomatic cases for 70+, whereas most
20-30 year olds are symptomatic: that could explain a lot about why death
rates seem absurdly low for below 40 year olds - sampling error because most
20-30 show symptoms.

~~~
robocat
Asymptomatic ~50% for 50+.

 _Very interesting_ if that turns out to be fact.

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cjbprime
Note that, even if true, this doesn't mean it can't destroy a country's
healthcare system. At least 10% of cases appear to require hospitalization for
pneumonia. No country has enough hospital beds for 10% of its population. Once
you're out of beds, many people who need critical care start dying instead.

~~~
rogerkirkness
To be entirely fair to the statistics presented here, it is suggesting that
only 4% of people require hospitalization assuming 60% are in fact
asymptomatic but positive tests.

~~~
cjbprime
True enough! The 4% would still overwhelm any country's health system. E.g. US
has around 300,000 available hospital beds, and 4% of population is 13M, 43x
higher.

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haidut
Excerpt:

"...Infections and deaths onboard suggest that the disease’s true fatality
ratio in China is about 0.5 percent, though that number may vary from place to
place, researchers report March 9 in a paper posted at MedRxiv.org. That 0.5
percent is far less than the 3.4 percent of confirmed cases that end in death
cited by the World Health Organization, but troubling nonetheless. The WHO’s
number has come under fire because the true number of people infected with the
virus worldwide is not known."

Link to the actual study:

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v2)

