[zdragnar]

The answer being sought is just how deadly is this virus? Knowing that helps everyone plan, and thus far, mortality rates haven't been very high at all except in very vulnerable populations.

However, should the virus mutate, or otherwise start posing a larger problem to the general public, the calculus of just how under-prepared are we radically changes.

It has nothing to do with blame and everything to do with dealing with the reality of the pandemic. Are we facing an extremely contagious flu, or are we facing an extremely contagious 1918 / Spanish flu? There is a pretty serious difference between the two in terms of preparedness needed.

[beat]

A mortality rate of 2-3% is "very high". And it's not just "very vulnerable populations". I'm 55, in generally good shape, but I have (medically controlled) hypertension. So my odds of dying are like 5%.

My daughter is 26, and winds up in the ER once a year or so for asthma. What are her odds? My mother is 78, has had open heart surgery, and is overweight and gets almost no exercise. I'm more or less assuming I will never see her again.

"Mortality rates haven't been very high at all" is easy to say when you're not in any way vulnerable.

[zdragnar]

The question wasn't "are vulnerable people vulnerable" it was "why is there a focus on whether a person might have had another condition?". The answer potentially changes the extent to which our hospital systems are inadequate to treat patients.

Keep in mind that 2-5% is likely way overblown given how little testing has been done. Unless I am misinformed, the Diamond Princess cruise that had been infected and quarantined had a fatality rate under 1%, and that presumably had a more vulnerable population. A more realistic mortality rate is well below 1% https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

In either case, I am actually more vulnerable than the standard healthy young adult, and it is very easy to say that mortality rates havent been high, especially in the context of a discussion over whether the virus might be mutating to become even more deadly than it already is.

[beat]

If you want to play pedantic with the numbers, you need to be a lot more aggressive with the whys. Italy currently has a 7.2% mortality rate, but... they believe they are undercounting fatalities due to the virus, because the medical system is overwhelmed and many are dying without seeing doctors or being tested/treated.

Needless to say, a collapse of the medical system and an inability to treat those who are sick has a severe negative effect on the survival rate. That's what social distancing is about - reducing the rate of infection so we lower the peaks striking the medical system. If you develop pneumonia and go to a hospital and get put on a ventilator, you could well survive. If you can't get a ventilator because we as a civilization are out of them, well... you'll probably die, either directly from the virus or from opportunistic secondary bacterial infection.

So the numbers may be underestimated as well as overestimated. It's very much a circumstantial question, and when we haven't scaled cases into the millions yet, we haven't seen the worst of what can happen.