Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SPQT 2197 days ago
No, China initially said a bunch o' stuff like 3-5%
1 comments

Not really, no. You can go back to medical journal articles from early march and see they were using Chinese and Korean data and predicted between 0.1-1% death rate per infection (IFR).

Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R. Redfield, M.D. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

Published February 29, 2020

> On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2