This is insane -- Median age of 60 for diagnosed patients?
What this indicates to me is that Italy was testing only the worst patients. This whole scare to me reeks of sampling bias. We only test the worst patients for covid 19 which ups the mortality rate.
The truth is -- people who are at risk should social distance themselves rather than the general population. We want herd immunity to develop for this disease -- that means having young healthy people be exposed to it.
Absolutely there is huge sampling bias in testing. This is true over the entire world.
No one knows what percent of the broader population in Italy have been infected, asymptomatic or otherwise.
We can hope the number is closer to 1 million or 10 million than it is to 100,000. Because you can’t hide the severe and critical cases, a wider incidence means a lower severity. But we have no scientific data on this absolutely crucial statistic.
The only proxy we have is the positive rate for tests that are performed. Recently it was reported that the positive testing rate in NYC was as a high as 28%. This implies that the general population infection incidence is extremely high, e.g. several million cases in NYC. Ideally you would want to see a positive test rate closer to 1-3%.
Is that realistic? Many of the most vulnerable people are in nursing homes with a lot of younger staff, or else they have to go to the doctor/hospital frequently for other reasons. It’s hard to see how it won’t end up infecting a huge number of these people if we let it spread at the max rate.
It sounds like you've understood it correctly. The data strongly suggests that COVID-19 isn't a deadly disease for otherwise healthy people, and any apparently healthy young people who die from it are most likely "errors and odd cases". (Although framing it that way could imply too strong of a conclusion - comorbidities in the study include hypertension and diabetes, which aren't exactly rare.)
The hospitalization rates for younger people in Italy and NYC don’t paint such a rosy picture though. While deaths are rare, it’s still a very nasty disease for many younger people, and we don’t have much data yet on potential long term effects.
No, we don't, but what people are interested in here is the lockdowns and when they can end - totally or partly.
The hospitalisations of young people all so far appear to be exceptional cases. This is also true of the reports of "fully healthy people". So far every case I'm aware of like that has turned out to be a lie. It implies the lockdowns could be restricted to the elderly and the frail.
In one case in the UK a woman under 40 was admitted to ICU with no pre-existing health conditions. Worrying, right? She'd been taking 8 ibuprofen a day. Ibuprofen suppresses the immune system and 8 per day is a staggeringly high overdose. The maximum dose for an adult is 4 per day so she was killing her immune system completely.
In another case there was a death of a young person in Spain, reported as no pre-existing conditions. After the death he was diagnosed with an unrecognised leukemia.
It's very likely given how extreme the statistical evidence is that basically all such cases have some sort of mitigating factor. Young people who are healthy and not doing stupid things don't seem to die or even get critically ill.
"The hospitalisations of young people all so far appear to be exceptional cases."
This is just wrong. The numbers are changing all the time, but as of a few days ago, 38% of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the US were between 20 and 54.
What this indicates to me is that Italy was testing only the worst patients. This whole scare to me reeks of sampling bias. We only test the worst patients for covid 19 which ups the mortality rate.
The truth is -- people who are at risk should social distance themselves rather than the general population. We want herd immunity to develop for this disease -- that means having young healthy people be exposed to it.