Coronavirus **support** thread
162 watchers
Mar 2020
2:26pm, 3 Mar 2020
25,702 posts
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Wriggling Snake
There was a question on that asked today at the press conference, indeed the chinese situation is different, so better understanding will come from similar countries, i.e Italy, the older you are the more likley to die you are especially over 80! I think your numbers a a little wrong, 1800+ cases, 52 deaths in italy (as of monday). The reported number of cases will be lower as a lot ofpeople may not have symptoms worthy of reporting.. |
Mar 2020
2:29pm, 3 Mar 2020
26,349 posts
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HellsBells
I suspect in many poorer countries without a coherent central health system, there will be many more cases and deaths than are reported as most patients won‘t see a medical practitioner and won‘t be tested
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Mar 2020
2:35pm, 3 Mar 2020
6,517 posts
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jda
More or Less covered this too not long ago. Yes, just calculating deaths/diagnoses at a moment in time is in principle wrong for the reasons SFL mentions. However, as well as those currently ill who haven't had time to die, there are also those who become ill but are never diagnosed. Mortality also varies wildly by age and other health conditions (and quite probably, treatment for those who get seriously ill) which will make populations differ from region to region. The upshot was that the expert opinion was probably around 1-2% but with a significant margin of error. Now that the Chinese figures are going down in Wuhan, the total mortality there looks more like 4%, but there are still possibly many uncounted mild cases and no longer so many about-to-die cases. The Chinese stats are also broken down by age and show small values for everyone under 50 or so, rising rapidly for more elderly. |
Mar 2020
2:36pm, 3 Mar 2020
1,347 posts
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SFL
I think we're referring to different numbers. I was talking about cases with an outcome (from the Guardian today). 149 people have recovered, 52 have died. The other 1600 are still ill so you can't really include them in the fatality rate until you know whether or not they will recover. I'm not suggesting for a moment that I think the fatality rate is 25 percent, but for it to be 1 percent there would need to be 5200 cases in Italy. That would mean that two thirds of cases were so mild that people were unaware they had the disease. If that was the case the outbreak across the world would already be much, much more widespread than it is now. |
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Mar 2020
2:40pm, 3 Mar 2020
1,348 posts
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SFL
and that's if you're counting all the currently I'll people as survivors
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Mar 2020
2:45pm, 3 Mar 2020
6,519 posts
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jda
Italy is a small data set in an area with (AIUI) a lot of elderly. It might also depend on how deaths are classified. But important to realise that the Chinese death rate seems to be more like 15% in the oldest so the overall proportion depends hugely on the characteristics of the infected population.
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Mar 2020
2:45pm, 3 Mar 2020
25,705 posts
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Wriggling Snake
I would say the outbreak is certainly more widespread there is no way of knowing how many people say to themselves, I feel a bit off today, I'll soldier on.
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Mar 2020
2:58pm, 3 Mar 2020
1,349 posts
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SFL
I would agree that there are probably some people who get it so mildly that they don't realise they have it, but if the fatality rate is based on the betting huge numbers of people like that I would guess that it's probably wrong. If they're were thousands of people walking round with this virus undetected then surely there would have been thousands of cases of untraceable transmissions. Also the WHO has made the exact same mistake in the past with SARS, where they eventually revised the fatality rate up from less than 4% to 10% (and even that was weighted heavily by dubious Chinese figures). The fatality rate for SARS (ignoring the Chinese data) was actually 16%. My guess is that the fatality rate for this virus is closer to 3% than 1%. I'm not saying this to worry anyone unnecessarily, but the more seriously people take this thing, the better the outcome is likely to be for everyone. |
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Mar 2020
3:41pm, 3 Mar 2020
6,520 posts
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jda
Wouldn't quibble with 3%. Looking at the Italy wikipedia page they list a lot of the deaths (not sure if it's all of them) and at a glance the vast majority, perhaps every single one of them is elderly. en.wikipedia.org |
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Mar 2020
3:44pm, 3 Mar 2020
6,521 posts
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jda
And by coincidence the Guardian has just written "The virus has killed 52 people in Italy, all aged between 63 and 95 with underlying serious illnesses." theguardian.com |
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