[zabana]

What's the alternative ? Mass hysteria ? Hoarding of basic necessities ? It's like people feed off of this apocalyptic porn atmosphere, very disturbing.

It's been weeks now that people have been throwing the same line: "well wait and see in two weeks".

According to official stats, there are 17k deaths worldwide at the time of writing for 450k confirmed cases, assuming the number of cases grows exponentially, the death rate will eventually be much lower than what people are projecting.

[CaptArmchair]

That's a reflection of how wide / narrow is being tested by those who entered health care systems. It's extremely hard to accurately extrapolate that to a global population.

The million dollar question here is how many cases go unnoticed. How many deaths go unnoticed. Nobody really knows.

Nobody knows how mortality is going to evolve either, since nobody knows how well health care systems around the world will be able to cope. Collapsing health care systems will yield a different outcome then those that do cope. And we don't know how they will cope.

So, I'm not accepting either "a few ten thousands" or "multiple millions" of deaths predictions at face value. The right answer is the very uncertain "we do not know".

What is clear is that people die from this, that no one is immune, and that a confusing response of authorities that aren't able to rally together doesn't really spark confidence.

[hiram112]

> The million dollar question here is how many cases go unnoticed. How many deaths go unnoticed. Nobody really knows.

Few deaths are going unnoticed. Even without this virus, there are cases every year in the US of isolated seniors dying at home because they were unable or unwilling to seek help. But it is trivial.

As far as actual cases of CV, can't we assume that the highest possible accurate infection rates would be coming from the countries with the best testing - those who are testing randomly or even those who aren't sick. And even in those countries, we're not seeing a death rate any higher than a normal flu season, apparently.

In the US, we're only testing those who show up at the hospital and are already sick. Our infected rate is missing out on all those people who don't need hospital care or don't even realize they already had and recovered from the virus.

So most countries have, in fact, a much smaller death rate than what is being published. If anything, the math here is telling us that we're overreacting, and the only question is by how much.

[CaptArmchair]

Those are valid points. But we don't know if the samples we have are representative. Either because of their size, or their composition.

Extrapolating the results from one context into a different context - different parameters (i.e. hospital capacity, treatment, prevention, local culture,...) - also yields a skewed view.

Even experts don't know how ugly it's going to get:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/infectious-disease-expe...

So, I don't want to make any guesses about exact death rates. That's just a number. What we do know is that a substantial number of people who get sick will need intensive care. How bad things will get depends on how well health care and social security systems will be able to cope; and how the other domino's - companies, taxpayers,... - will cope with that reality.

[Amygaz]

And 1.8 billion people in stay-at-home mode, but you may not think this may have anything to do with it.

Did you simply just woke up and decided to troll?