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by kgwgk 2262 days ago
> Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this.

It's not about "testing in Italy":

"In Lombardy – despite the region being under lockdown since March 9 – more than one in every 1,000 of the entire population have already been hospitalised due to coronavirus."

1 comments

But we don't know the actual amount of people which were infected in Italy, because some of these (a sizable percentage) only reported fevers, and perhaps didn't even think about having SARS-CoV-2 in their bodies.

An acquaintance's partner suspects having got it, because after two days (two days, not weeks) of very mild fever (~37.5C) he was hit by anosmia. An ex-coworker also mentioned "a horribly strong fever" with respiratory difficulties which lasted just a few days. Yes, anecdata, but shows that you can easily miss a large part of the infected cases if you only test those hospitalized.

You’re missing the point. We know for sure that in Lombardy the hospitalisation rate was higher than 1 in 1000 people infected.
We do not know the Lombardy hospitalisation rate because we do not have an accurate count of how many people have been infected in Lombardy.

To get such a count we would need 100% serological testing which has not been done. We know how many were infected at the time of testing but the whole point of the Oxford model is that we do not know how many have been infected, not shown symptoms, and recovered.

Once again, the core point of the Oxford model was to emphasise the need for serological testing.

We don’t know the Lombardy hospitalisation rate.

We definitely know it’s higher than 1 in 1000.

Unless you all think that the number of people infected may be higher than the number of people.