[apatters]

What specific evidence would you be expecting to see in December or January? The infection fatality rate for this disease is probably below 1%, and we don't know what percentage of the population is infected. We don't truly know how quickly it spreads. Nursing home populations are at greater risk, but even if the IFR is 3-5% for that cohort, the population mortality would be some fraction of that, and most of the deaths would be people with pre-existing conditions, and the deaths would be attributed to those conditions.

If there was a year-on-year increase of 1-2% in nursing home deaths for a month or two, would that register with anybody? Maybe they would have noticed if a lot of people were being put on respirators? But if no one knew about COVID they would probably just chalk that up to it being a bad flu season.

[IanCal]

> Nursing home populations are at greater risk, but even if the IFR is 3-5% for that cohort, the population mortality would be some fraction of that,

Looking much higher than that. 80+ is 15-20% and 70-79 is 8% (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...). It'll be concentrated more in people with pre-existing conditions so I expect nursing homes would see greater figures than that.

> Statistics from Kirkland now appear to tell the national story. Of 129 staff members, visitors and residents who got sick, all but one of the 22 who died were older residents,

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/11/nursing-home...

So we're not talking about one or two deaths but a large proportion of your residents suddenly getting ill in the same way and of those a large proportion dying over a short period.

[apatters]

> Looking much higher than that. 80+ is 15-20% and 70-79 is 8%

The percentages you're citing are from the Chinese CDC [1] and represent the case fatality rate. They don't represent the infection fatality rate, let alone the overall population mortality. There's a big difference between these numbers which has been repeatedly ignored in the popular media, they keep on taking the scariest one (CFR) and presenting it in an unbalanced context. [2]

(To be fair, CFRs are the numbers we are the most certain about, but when you cherrypick the worst ones like the newspapers do they're also the scariest and least useful.)

The working definition of CFR in the Chinese study is basically people who saw a doctor, were suspected or confirmed of having COVID, and then died. But many other people would have caught the disease and not been seen by a doctor. Most of them would have been milder cases and they wouldn't have died. Key point is this number is not at all indicative of total Covid-related mortality in an exposed population.

The Kirkland story is really tragic, but it's just one data point and doesn't prove that ~15% of all nursing home populations will die. The conditions in other nursing homes could be very different, in fact that nursing home in Kirkland has since been investigated and fined $600,000 for unsafe practices [3].

[1] http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate

[3] https://komonews.com/news/coronavirus/kirkland-nursing-home-...