[arcticbull]

> A healthy 30 something has an IFR of something like 0.1%. Doesn't justify a lockdown for a year; does for a couple months.

It's not 0.1% for a 30-something. The Gangelt survey showed a total population fatality rate of 0.37%, and so far the CFR has ranged from 0% in children to 0.1% for 30-somethings to 15% for 85 year olds.

The Gangelt survey showed 0.37% actual vs. a CFR of 2% overall in Germany so we can divide the CFR for each age group likely by 10. It's probably close to 0.01% for a healthy 30-something.

> Sweden has experienced over 500 covid deaths in a week. That's a 30% excess death rate. Hardly "fine".

It ... is fine, when you take into account that they're never going to get it again, whereas every other country in the world is vulnerable to a single person showing up and re-starting the entire process for everyone. It's not this lockdown I'm worried about it's the next one, when a single person shows up in downtown NYC and we're right back at it again.

Hiding inside is not solving the problem because it's an incredibly infectious disease. Unless you can lock down every single person in the entire world for the entire duration, it will fail.

> I see little evidence it is in line with the flu, unless you are talking about historically deadly flus, not seasonal ones. Flu would not have killed 1.5% of the Diamond Princess population that was infected. 0.7% IFR seems about right (Diamond Princess, Iceland, etc. suggest around this) and that's >7x bad seasonal flu years.

The Gangelt survey showed 0.37% vs the flu at 0.1%. It's worse, I've long maintained it's worse, but it's not massively worse. Certainly not stop-the-world worse. [1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tes...

[detaro]

(It's currently (among other points) debated how well the tests used for the Gangelt survey can tell SARS-CoV-2 from other coronaviruses, and given how little they've published unclear how they corrected for that. Hopefully they'll release more info soon, but lots of experts are skeptical of this specific study, they might very well have classified a bunch of folks that had a cold as "corona")

[usaar333]

We have to be pretty careful about demographic adjustments. Does the town surveyed have any nursing homes or hospitals? If not, that'll drastically drop the death rate.

By my napkin math, you get to about a 2-fold difference which explains the 0.37% vs. 0.7% numbers. But remember the flu 0.1% also includes those highly susceptible people.

[arcticbull]

Heh, the delta is likely because: (1) Iceland has had 6 deaths so it's way, way too early to draw any conclusions from Iceland and (2) everyone onboard the Diamond Princess was onboard a cruise ship, and cruises tend to skew old. The median age of passengers was 69. That age group is affected ~100X harder than young folks (9% CFR vs 0.1% CFR) [1]. If you've got more data to back 0.7% please do share but I've found none compelling so far.

Although for what it's worth Iceland is showing 6 deaths and 1600 confirmed cases for a fatality rate of --- wait for it --- 0.35%.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e3.htm#T1_down

[usaar333]

My numbers generally comes from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3....

That paper would give about 3% for a 70 year old. But remember that cruise passengers are healthy enough to be on cruises. 1.5% death rate seems about reasonable when you correct for that (again, this is where you might see that 2x difference).

Iceland has a considerable number of unresovled cases. Whether you use 7 deaths out of 751 recovered, or 20% hospitalization death rate, you get somewhere on the order of 0.9% CFR.

[arcticbull]

This is all case data, not population studies. The Gangelt study is different because they tested the entire population and not just people walking into hospitals. They found the CFR in Germany (2%) was roughly 10X higher than the actual mortality rate in town.

The CFR is always going to suffer from adverse selection bias at this stage because they're only including people sick enough to walk into a hospital, and not folks who were asymptomatic, and not folks who got mild symptoms and didn't tell anyone. That's going to be basically every young person. Only the old end up in hospital and they're dramatically worse hit.

Population studies are not directly comparable. A global CFR of 1.5-2.5% sounds right, but that doesn't mean that's a mortality rate. The mortality rate is closer to 0.37% based on the population study I cited.

You seem to be arbitrarily multiplying and dividing CFR by 2 to fit a narrative. I'd love to see other population data but I think this was the first and only study, which is why the numbers are much different than you're citing.

[usaar333]

Does the town have any nursing homes? Those are accounting for a large percent of deaths in the United States. (Around 20% in California). If a small town has already shipped its least healthy population away, its IFR will look lower.