[thebigspacefuck]

If you look at the case study of the first patient in the US from New England Journal of Medicine the patient didn’t get to a poor condition until day 11 of the illness https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191 at which point they tried an experimental antiviral and he recovered. 11 days ago, there were 527 cases. Patient in study didn’t come in until 2 days after having the sickness so if you look at -9 days infected was at 943. Currently at 305 deceased and 443 recovered, total of 748, so it seems like the infected between 9 and 11 days ago are the ones recovering or dying. The number of infected goes up rapidly from that point (now we are at over 16x number of infected from 9 days ago), so we’ll see the numbers get more accurate soon. Although number of cases rapidly increases, the antiviral treatments seem to help dramatically and they have just begun to start experimenting with them. Currently sitting at 40% mortality using D/D+R, but I imagine we’ll see more recoveries as antivirals are used.

[ericb]

Keep in mind, this is a self-selected group of people. There could be 10x more asymptomatic, or low impact cases who thought they had the flu, but didn't feel bad enough to go to the hospital. Imagine if I tried to capture the survival rate of the flu, but chose my population of patients from the ICU. Would the numbers be right?

I think this is born out by the really small number of children showing up in the mortality numbers. Proportionally, kids usually over-represent transmission, I think, from kid-level hygiene and being crowded into small classrooms. They seem under-represented in the study population, which makes me think there could be a lot of selection bias being captured.

Additionally, the standard for recovery is really high and is built in a way that it will severely lag deaths (which have no waiting period). I think it was something like total clearance of the virus, not "feels good, now surfs reddit all day."

[cstejerean]

There could also be many X more cases that haven’t been confirmed because they can’t get access to transportation to a hospital, or because the hospitals are overwhelmed, or because they are running low on test kits or behind the schedule on testing. I wouldn’t assume that the unreported numbers are strictly positive.

[colsmit]

I appreciate you linking this - I've read at least a books worth of panicked news coverage over the past week and had not seen a single story about potentially successful application of antivirals. I guess fear sells better.