Mortality Rate of Covid-19 Is 0.5%, Much Lower Than CDC / WHO Claims

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-outbreak-diamond-princess-cruise-ship-death-rate

by haidut • 6 years ago

12 10 6 years ago

haidut2• 6 years ago

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...

robocat3• 6 years ago

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...

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.

robocat3• 6 years ago

Asymptomatic ~50% for 50+.

Very interesting if that turns out to be fact.

cjbprime2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

cjbprime2• 6 years ago

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.

robocat3• 6 years ago

At least 10% of cases

That is likely 10% of people showing symptoms.

The study says 50% of people are asymptomatic (mostly 60+ years old from that data) then the total number of people in population needing a bed halves to 5%.

However I found it unclear from paper whether 50% are not showing symptoms because they only just got infected (i.e. would show symptoms 5 days later on average).

dang2• 6 years ago

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

haidut2• 6 years ago

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.

dang2• 6 years ago

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 subtitle, 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=true&que...

Mortality Rate of Covid-19 Is 0.5%, Much Lower Than CDC / WHO Claims

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