[alistproducer2]

The 1-3% is an average among all age groups. You clearly have not looked at the data. For example, in Italy the CFR is somewhere around 14% for elderly. Everyone else is lower such that the nominal death rate, being an average among all groups,.has been consistently running around 8%.

Obviously when this matures that rate will go lower because the denominator will grow but the denominator that people care about is the one we have now: who is sick enough to need a test because if I get sick, and thus become part of that denominator, the current rate gives me a good picture of my chances. Was the parent comment slightly hyperbolic, maybe. But you are way underselling the seriousness of this disease and the rationality of being scared of it.

[whb07]

Holy cow. Notice how everyone literally says “there’s not enough testing” but yet you’re able to rationalize the CFR as valid.

What you see going to the hospital and getting tested CLEARLY is the most critical number of cases. It’s possible that for every person tested, there are 100 or more that are asymptomatic. Run some numbers on this “highly contagious” disease.

Another point why we are in a fear bubble is that everyone parrots the same fear gospel and there’s very few dissenters.

Bring on the downvotes you scared folks

[dillondoyle]

WHO assistant director general & epidemiologist Bruce Aylward's investigation in China found that there wasn't a significant 'iceberg.' There's other supporting data elsewhere. I find these three paragraphs easy to digest:

-- " In Guangdong province, for example, there were 320,000 tests done in people coming to fever clinics, outpatient clinics. And at the peak of the outbreak, 0.47 percent of those tests were positive. People keep saying [the cases are the] tip of the iceberg. But we couldn’t find that. We found there’s a lot of people who are cases, a lot of close contacts — but not a lot of asymptomatic circulation of this virus in the bigger population. And that’s different from flu. In flu, you’ll find this virus right through the child population, right through blood samples of 20 to 40 percent of the population.

If you didn’t find the “iceberg” of mild cases in China, what does it say about how deadly the virus is — the case fatality rate?

It says you’re probably not way off. The average case fatality rate is 3.8 percent in China, but a lot of that is driven by the early epidemic in Wuhan where numbers were higher. If you look outside of Hubei province [where Wuhan is], the case fatality rate is just under 1 percent now. I would not quote that as the number. That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying. "

https://www.vox.com/2020/3/2/21161067/coronavirus-covid19-ch...

[yibg]

There can be a wide range of assumption. Anywhere from "all the people we know about are all that are infected" to "everyone else in the world is already infected".

Regardless, the death tolls kind of speak for themselves. What's more, the increase in death toll too. In Italy alone there are over 4000 dead, with a few hundred more a day now. Italy has a population of 60 million. Extrapolating even the current death count in Italy to the rest of the world, and that's 400k deaths. All indications are that it'll be higher than that uncontrolled.

Maybe people are overreacting. But in this case isn't it better to error on the side of caution? Otherwise by the time we realize we're wrong and millions are dying, what do we do then?

[whb07]

I’ll give you a couple reasons why Italy is the mess it is:

1. Significantly older population

2. Shitty healthcare

For context many years ago, the state of Ohio in the US had more MRI machines than all of Canada combined. It’s very possible that due to budget constraints and other things, they have terrible health infrastructure.

Why do we believe that all nations are equal? I can take a look at the Olympics and notice that isn’t the case. Italians make better cars as compared to the French. So maybe they have terrible elderly healthcare? That seems more likely than “super disease kills only Italians and now comes after Americans”

[RHSeeger]

As I understand it, one of the first cities in Italy to have problems keeping up with healthcare .... has some of the best health care in Europe.

[ivalm]

There is no treatment other than providing ventilation to the very sick.

[chrisco255]

There's at least two therapeutic candidates: chloroquine and remdesivir. See: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/20/wuhan-coronavirus-the...

[ivalm]

I already answered this in a sister comment. There are at least 3 candidates (Chloroquine , Remdesivir, Favipiravir ) and they are all unlikely to work.

[whb07]

Yes there are some possible treatments and a number of vaccines are already being studied now.

[ivalm]

Vaccines are at least a year away. In order of most to least likely to work:

1. Chloroquine is hepotoxic and since cytokine storms is already one of the way covid19 leads to death there is a lot of question whether chloroquine can actually help (in terms of aggregate effect on CFR).

2. Remdesivir didn't work for ebola (original target) and there is no reason to think it would work for covid19.

3. Favipiravir shows activity against many viruses (SARS-CoV-2 included), but doesn't actually reduce mortality for other viral illnesses (unknown for convid19).

Key to understand, many things show activity with the virus but don't actually improve the disease progression.

[oggy]

If there are 100 or more asymptomatic and untested cases per tested case, then the disease is very highly contagious, given the timeframe we're looking at.