
The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong, and Everyone Knows It - svrma
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-really-have-coronavirus/607348/
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vanniv
The only numbers anywhere in the world that are probably actually correct are
from Diamond Princess. They tested everyone multiple times, and very likely
detected every case eventually.

The Diamond Princess is an unintentional "natural" experiment. It is likely
that the disease spread much more effectively aboard the ship than it would
elsewhere in the world, but otherwise, the data should be useful.

Keep in mind that cruises skew older (than the overall population), even when
accounting for crew -- so you might expect higher mortality than in a random
sample, but it is as good of a natural experiment as we are going to get.

(This is relevant because older people die more often -- for example, at age
80, you have a 10% chance of death by any cause each year anyway -- and with
this now being day 42 since the outbreak, that's more than 10% of a year, so
you'd expect 1% of 80-year-olds aboard to have died even without the virus for
example)

So far, 706 cases yielded 6 deaths ruled caused by the virus, 1 death ruled
unrelated to the virus, and 36 serious active cases, with 212 declared
recovered to date.

Most of these cases are more than 21 days old now, so most of the remaining
mild cases will likely be resolved soon (either by recovery or by becoming a
serious case).

The #dead and #serious have been stable for almost a week at this point. We
will see what happens, of course.

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blackrock
The death statistics from China is not a truly reliable indicator, for one
simple reason: that Wuhan was hit with a massive onslaught, a denial-of-
service, that overwhelmed their medical system.

There was simply not enough resources to service everyone, and those that came
later, probably fared worse, and lost their lives.

In a normal situation, the sick people would be more evenly spread out across
the country, that all the hospitals and clinics should be able to handle them,
and provide them with medical care in a timely manner.

The key indicator to realize how deadly this virus is, might actually be
Italy. There, the virus diffused evenly throughout the country, that their
medical system should be able to handle the caseload. We shall see how well
this theory plays out in 2 weeks.

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yummybear
It would be interesting to randomly test, say, 500 patients with flu/cold like
symptoms to see how many are actually Corona.

~~~
_bxg1
What they should do is randomly test 500 (or ideally more) _people_. Just
random people. Then that can be broken down into what percentage have the
disease, and each can be followed up to have their eventual symptoms, if any,
studied, including death. That would give the most accurate picture. Anything
else is going to be heavily skewed.

