[m12k]

A relevant question is also, if most deaths really are among immunocompromised, elderly or very young, then how many of those 2% would have been killed by the flu or similar if coronavirus hadn't shown up? 14 million dead is terrible by any measure, but I'm wondering how much of a change over the norm it actually represents.

[sarabande]

I'm not an epidemiologist. Anyway, I looked up the most recent CDC flu death estimates for 2018-2019[1]:

34157 dead from 35520883 infected, let's see how much hire a 2% corona virus mortality rate is above the normal flu mortality rate in the US:

>>> .02 / (34157 / 35520883.) 20.798596480955588

About 21 times higher.

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

[koheripbal]

It's 3-4 orders of magnitude more deadly than the normal seasonal flu. The mortality rate is similar to SARS, but with far more infections.

The above comment saying that it "mostly" impacts elderly is a bit vague. The fact that within the first 100 deaths were multiple young healthy people means it is dangerous for the entire population. People in their 30s and 40s are not "old".

[bart_spoon]

There was a single death of someone in their 30s out of 100+. And I don't even know if its been confirmed if they were immunocomprimised or not. Every other person to die was 47 or above, many of who had previous health issues. 1 out of 100 is is a pretty good indication that it mostly dangerous to the older population. The fact that no young children to have died yet, which also tend to be a vulnerable group for viruses like influenza and SARS is also worth noting.

Also, you should be more precise in your wording. 3-4 orders of magnitude worse than the flu is absolutely not true. The mortality rate for the flu is around 14.3 per 100,000. With this as a baseline, 4 orders of magnitude is 143%, which isn't actually possible unless you are aware of people being able to die more than once. Even 3 orders of magnitude is 14.3%, which is higher than SARS. The current estimate is around 2%, which is more like 2 orders of magnitude.

[ilkan]

"50% of the deaths were under 47"... fixed that for you. Also implying people over 47 are elderly and not worthy caring about? Most middle managers, craftsmen, ceo's, politicians, doctors, professors, military officers would disagree.

[bart_spoon]

50% of deaths were under 47? Do you have a source for this? Because I can't find that anywhere, and the last time anyone reported any numbers it was literally all but 1 were 47 or older.

And I'm not implying that people 47 and older arent worth caring about. But that group is always tends to have more severe health problems, which is why people should take those numbers with a grain of salt.

[davedx]

> It's 3-4 orders of magnitude more deadly than the normal seasonal flu

Citation?

[koheripbal]

Influenza deaths are 2 per 100,000.

source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/flu.htm

SARS death rate is around 10%

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

[cjhopman]

You are comparing apples to oranges.

Here's a better set of comparisons:

Deaths per 100,000:

Influenza: 2

SARS: 0.22

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/flu.htm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China

% of deaths of hospitalized people:

Influenza: ~10%

SARS: ???

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

% of deaths of diagnosed people (~CFR):

SARS: ~10%

Influenza: 0.1%-10% per strain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr..., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/

[koheripbal]

Your 0.22 number is nowhere in your sources, and is obviously off by several orders of magnitude based off of my original sources above.

[cjhopman]

I think you don't understand how mortality rates are calculated. This also explains why you took two completely unrelated measure and compared them to each other in your original post. Deaths per 100,000 is based on total population.

The SARS mortality rate for China in 2003 was ~0.02 (349 deaths, 1.3billion population). I was being nice to you and using just the population of southern china where the sars outbreak primarily occurred.

Whether that's the most appropriate measure for this comparison isn't clear, which is why included the other measures.