
Italy historically has had excess mortality for influenza - formerchamp
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/abstract
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Gatsky
The case fatality is <1%, Italy just has a lot of people infected with SARS-
CoV-2. There must be over a million cases in Italy, they just aren’t able to
test everyone. The age distribution is similar in South Korea.

As bad as Italy is, India worries me the most by far.

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taeric
Do you have evidence that Italy has more infected than anywhere else? Because,
that is what this would take, at this point.

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Gatsky
No direct evidence. But any reasonable parameters for the viral reproductive
number and mortality, along with clear evidence of asymptomatic carriage, lead
to this inevitable conclusion.

~~~
taeric
To be fair, I agree the expected case to death rate is less than one percent
normally. The questions this leads to, is why it is higher on Italy? Either in
reach of infection, or in deaths?

This article implies their infection to death rate was already elevated for
the flu. Most accept this is, at best, a deadly flu. That would strengthen
this hypothesis.

But your hypothesis seems to be there are more infected in Italy than
elsewhere. But you then have to explain why it did more there.

If we have infection to death rates in all countries, that would let us
predict if the first hypothesis is true. To test yours? What can we do?

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Gatsky
I don’t think there is anything special about Italy, they just started earlier
than other countries (1st cases were 3 weeks before other Euro countries) and
in some provinces didn’t take it seriously.

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taeric
Per another thread, the US has to start seeing the numbers they have had to
date every two days for this to be worse then last year's flu. Per this
article, Italy has to continue with their current pace to hit last year's
numbers. For another few weeks.

Let that sink in. Italy had 25,000 deaths attributed to flu like illness two
years ago. They are at 6000. Accepting that this is a hard flu like virus, we
would expect them to have bad numbers. Why? What is so bad about Italy?

Again, comparing to the flu is not minimizing. The flu is already a terrible
virus.

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airstrike
I'd like to note that so far we only know the mortality rate under the
assumption that every patient that needs to be hospitalized (~18% of infected
looking at NY's numbers) receives treatment. That is why the elderly and
people with underlying health conditions are dying – they can't survive being
in an ICU with a nasty disease a lot of the time.

Once we run out of beds and ventilators, the picture will look very different.
I don't know about you, but I'm not old but I'd much rather be in a hospital
if I have a nasty case of pneumonia, but we certainly can't fit 40-80% of the
population in hospitals, let alone have enough health workers to treat them.

~~~
taeric
I'm not sure what you are claiming.

This article would imply that Italy was coming closer to saturation on
hospitals before this virus. Not claiming that this virus wasn't worse. The
implication is they were closing to a topping point than elsewhere.

It does fit, in that so far Italy is the outlier, not anyone else. Japan, in
particular, but also Norway, Germany, and most of the US.

I think Spain throws a but of a wrench at this, but don't have that looked at
handily.

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formerchamp
Can we trust Italy's numbers? They're attributing any questionable death to
corona to hide their embarrassing influenza death rate. This can almost
explain USA's minuscule death toll at 500 (influenza season averages 200/day).

~~~
cjhopman
For those wondering if the people minimizing this disease as nothing more than
a weaker influenza are correct, here's some data from new york's hospitals:
[https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-s...](https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-syndromic-
surveillance.pdf)

Visits to emergency for Influenza-likeIllness+Pneumonia is at ~1.5x a bad flu
season's peak and ~4x a normal flu season. Admissions for the same are at
~2-3x.

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taeric
I think people are claiming it is a stronger flu, not weaker.

I think there are lots of people that don't realize how many die of the flu
every year, but that is a different claim.

