
Coronavirus fatality rate could be as low as 0.26%, CDC says - mrfusion
https://techstartups.com/2020/05/24/coronavirus-fatality-rate-low-0-26-cdc-says/
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lmilcin
I wish there was an assessment with error bars not spanning multiple orders of
magnitude...

Jokes aside. If the number was true, for Italy (33k reported deaths) this
would give around 12M infected. For US (99k reported deaths) around 36M
infected. Those numbers seem to be unrealistic. I remember Italy did some
tests and even in the worst hit places less than 7% of population developed
antibodies, not average 25% for entire Italy as suggested.

I know this is very, very back of envelop calculation but it would be nice to
somehow reconcile those numbers.

~~~
rurban
Italy is one of the 7 outlier countries. It has an IFR even above 1%. But
Italy is always the highest flu outlier worldwide (regularily above 1%), so
there no reason to bring Italy into the discussion.

The other outliers are much more interesting, like Belgium, which has also a
reporting problem. UK, NL, Spain,...

0.3% has been the established number for a few months already. Reporting
always concentrated on the meaningless CFR at 3.4%, for political reasons. 10x
more asymptotic cases also reflect all the antibody tests. Asymptotic means an
ordinary cold.

That's why it's so dangerous. Low fatality rate, no symptoms, high
reproduction.

~~~
doliveira
So you're just going to ignore the randomized antibody tests they did in Italy
and Spain?

~~~
lmilcin
Sometimes, some situations are just not representative and we don't always
know the reason.

For example, mortality might have been higher because of inadequate care at
the highest of the pandemic. Or there might be some genes that are prevalent
or absent in the population that are specific to the region that make the
virus behave differently than for the rest of the world.

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WheelsAtLarge
The death rate is one thing but the hospitalization rate should not be
ignored. We've seen the overflowing capacity in New York and other places so
we need to be careful with just quoting the death rate and feeling that it's
no big deal. Whatever the death rate is we know that over 100k people have
died. And who knows how many thousands of survivors have dealt and will deal
with the damage the virus inflicts on their bodies. We should not take that
lightly.

I'm one that thinks that face masks and keeping social distance is the best
way to go. If we followed that without fail the transmission rate would
collapse and we would be close to normal.

~~~
tinus_hn
Overflowing hospitals with simultaneous overcapacity in unused emergency
hospitals. A major cause of this overflowing is poor distribution.

~~~
WheelsAtLarge
It's almost impossible to do both. You can't repurpose opticians as emergency
techs in a short time. It doesn't work. Hospitals are built given certain make
up and it's hard to change that in a short time.

~~~
tinus_hn
Both what? You’re not making a lot of sense here.

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sharemywin
330M*.0026 = 857K. in US. Herd immunity is like 60% of that number. That's a
lot of people. That could be your parent or grandparent or you.

I get so tired of people comparing this to the flu. It's over taken the number
of deaths from the flu in 2 months not 12. And that's while we were in locked
down.

Also, a whole lot of people get symptoms. I don't think having flu like
symptoms for 2 weeks(not 2-3 days) sounds like fun either.

~~~
addled
I had flu-like symptoms for 2-3 weeks in late Jan / early Feb, and you're
right, it is not fun at all.

I've been thinking about getting the antibody test. Kind of hoping I've
already had it. On the one hand would be nice to know that I "might" have some
immunity going forward, but on the other very scary to think covid has been
active in my community that long. The first official case in my state isn't
until a month later.

~~~
sharemywin
on the bright side if you did have it, it would mean you could get out and
enjoy your summer. :)

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winrid
Can't you still spread it though, or no?

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egeozcan
Immunity means that the immune system won the battle and killed the virus, and
develop tools to kill it so you won't get sick again. So, not impossible, but
very unlikely. Maybe this virus can hide itself like HIV and burst out
regularly to test the waters? Very unlikely but as I said, not absolutely
completely and utterly impossible.

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mikem170
>According to new estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), the COVID-19 infection fatality rate may be as low as 0.26%,
a number that only doubles the seasonal flu but significantly lower than
earlier estimates.

The news has been pushing worst case scenarios at every step of the way, not
doing a good job of presenting the complexities behind the facts and
estimates.

And lots of people seem to be blind to this. Maybe schools could be doing a
better job teaching critical thinking?

~~~
pengaru
> Maybe schools could be doing a better job teaching critical thinking?

Critical thinkers don't make for easy consumers.

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cozzyd
Considering that that's roughly the population fatality rate in NYC, and
significantly less than than the population fatality rate in Bergamo province,
that seems unlikely.

Is the methodology available somewhere? Scenario 5 looks suspiciously like the
geometric average of 0.2 and 1...

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rogerkirkness
PFR in Italy based on one of the oldest populations in the world, with the
worst NOx pollution in the world because of the mountains and industry,
without controlling for confounding reasons for dying (e.g. all severe cases
that hit the hospital counted and all mild cases that don't aren't).

~~~
cozzyd
The population fatality rate in Bergamo is based on the total number of COVID
deaths (estimated from excess mortality) and the total population. See
[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20067074v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20067074v3)

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harry8
Back of the envelope check as an exercise.

Population of northern Italy. Assume everyone contacted covid.

How many dead / pop

More or less than 0.26%

Or new York, or London.

See what numbers you come up with. Is this a reasonable thing for the cdc to
say or not?

Please do the exercise yourself and draw your own conclusion.

~~~
mikem170
I wondered about that.

But it is a reasonable number if you take into account that there were not
enough tests to detect all cases. I assume that now they are getting antibody
data and see that a lot more people caught this than they thought, not
exhibiting symptoms or needing medical care.

And there are things we still don't know, about how it spreads (turns out not
so much on surfaces), and about variants that are out there (why worse in NYC
and Europe than in parts of asia and west coast?) And local conditions (NYC is
very dense with subways, Northern Italy with intergenerational housing and
smoking, etc). More data is always good.

~~~
harry8
> But it is a reasonable number if you take into account that there were not
> enough tests to detect all cases.

Assume every single person contracted it and testing is irrelevant in the
calculation. Then you can adjust down to 90% contracted covid, or 80% or 20%
or whatever to see how that affects things if you want to.

Start with deaths/population and see what number comes up. It's a really
useful starting point. And a really useful skill to have to be able to check a
supplied number with a back of the envelope calculation. I say do it! For more
than one reason it's worthwhile.

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zaroth
The population-wide total IFR could be as low as 0.26% but it would depend
heavily on the demographics of the people infected.

If you infect 100 people under the age of 40 your IFR will likely be much
lower than even 0.26%. If just 10 of those 100 are over 80 then it’s a totally
different story.

Not all diseases have such a high spread in the mortality rate versus age as
COVID, which spans effectively 0%-20%. It makes discussions on the average IFR
less useful than they might otherwise be.

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tinus_hn
It would probably better to link to the linked page

[https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-
scena...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-
scenarios.html)

Note that the risks are dramatically different for different age groups, so if
one calculates a grand total this requires assumptions about age distribution.
The page notes the data is about the US.

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drinkcocacola
Well, I've been following numbers for the last two months in different
countries from different sources. My initial best estimations were that the
fatality rate was about 0.77% given the numbers in South Korea (high number of
tests). Other countries such Spain were reporting rates of about 10%, however
testing was quite low in comparison.

Recently Spain did a seroprevalence test (number of people with antibodies for
Coronavirus) with a large sample of people. They found that 5% of the
population had antibodies (2.4M people). Which means that the fatality rate is
actually about 1.1% and not 10%.

This numbers (from 0.77% to 1.16%) have been constant in different countries,
so let me express my disbelief with the numbers published by the CDC.

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randyrand
0.26% is well below the % of people that die every year (~1%). I wonder how
many of those people would have died this year regardless. We will be able to
tell in retrospect if the annual death rate is not significantly moved versus
last year.

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op00to
What about permanent cardiovascular damage? What’s that rate for flu and then
for coronavirus?

~~~
xt00
Yes, it would be very helpful to have the following numbers: 1) mortality rate
2) no symptom rate 3) negative outcome rate ->(some clear impact to patient
who has survived, but has life impacting effects)

So if you find for example that within a population of 100000 people that you
have 35% with no symptoms, and 0.26% died, then 64%+ had symptoms, so then how
many people had symptoms that likely are long-lasting. If for example 10% of
people had long lasting impacts, then that is a far greater number than
0.26%.. so before people say "look it ain't so bad".. then we need to
understand that number before people invite 100 people over to their house
party.

