[stanfordkid]

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.

[zaroth]

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%.

[danenania]

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.