>Also to note, fatality rate might seem low, but 20% of ALL patients will develop severe lung issue, that is what makes this virus pretty damn dangerous to us.
> Depending on the statistics used to date there have been between 2,860 and 4,759 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. This equates to between just 7% and 12% of the annual 40,000 deaths from flu.
Uuuh... yes... and half of those deaths happened in a single state... and within the span of three weeks
> The 2% number is 2% of people who have bad symptoms die.
I don't believe that's true. In countries such as Spain, right now there are about 80k confirmed recoveries and 19k deaths among a universe of 182k confirmed cases.
You say this as if 2% of people dying is somehow nothing. Think about everybody in your life that you care deeply about. Relatives, friends, mentors, etc. If this goes pandemic, at least one person in that category will likely die.
Only most of recently infected have no symptoms, whereas most of infected do develop symptoms, but typically after they already transmitted the illness to other people. According to what it is currently known, from all infected around 80% do eventually develop some symptoms, up to 10% need hospital, up to 5% need intensive care and around 1% of all infected eventually die. That is when observed across all age groups, among the older it's much worse.
And as soon as the health system can't cope the percentages of dead increase rapidly to even higher values -- i.e. those that need hospital need it because half of them will need intensive care (and nobody knows before it's critical who), those that need intensive care need it because most of them will need oxygen in some form and half of these will need:
> Very small percentage of infected people end up going to hospitals.
It's 10-20% according to most estimates, enough to flood every hospital system in the world. Once that happens the death toll starts creeping towards 20% as they can't treat patients and even people otherwise treatable problems can't get treated. This is the scenario that needs to be avoided.
> Vast majority of people who contract the virus just have mild cold or flu symptoms.
Mild in the medical sense, everyone not hospitalized is considered mild. In the everyday human sense this translates from nothing to extremely sick. If your friend had pneumonia you'd be concerned for them wouldn't you? Well that's a "mild" case.
> we have real data showing that there are long term effects from getting full blown COVID.
As in, 90% (probably more because asymptomatic people are never tested) of people actually have no symptoms at all and seem to go along fine with it? Or are you talking about something else?
> The data so far suggests that the virus has a case fatality risk around 1%; this rate would make it several times more severe than typical seasonal influenza and would put it somewhere between the 1957 influenza pandemic (0.6%) and the 1918 influenza pandemic (2%).
That was a little shocking to read. I had no idea the 1918 influenza pandemic was only 2%. I lost relatives to it, assumed it was a larger percentage than 2%.
> how is that just a unusually deadly seasonal flu
A smaller percentage of a very large number is still a very large number.
In March / April, people were claiming something on the order of a >10% fatality rate. We are much closer to 1%, and it drops off down to practically nothing once you get to anyone below middle-age.
> Even in a worst case scenario with no vaccination, COVID-19 would kill less than 1% of the world population.
Wrong. 5% of people need a ventilator, and 20% of people get hospitalized.
When you run out of ventilators, the death rate spikes (see Italy). When you run out of hospital beds, things will get even worse.
Worst case scenario is probably closer to 10%. When you literally can't breath on your own, you die rather quickly. We have lots of ventilators in this country, but not enough to cover even just 1% of our population. If the virus ran completely rampant without restrictions, we'd reach the 5% mark rather quickly as those people suddenly can't breath for a week.
> The numbers are the latest evidence to suggest that people who are asymptomatic — contagious but not physically sick — may be driving the spread of the virus
That’s also suggesting that the fatality rate is nowhere near what we have been led to believe.
> CDC estimates that 45-55% of all Americans had been infected with COVID.
If we take 330 million people as an estimated US population, an IFR of 0.012 and 0.5 of everyone infected, that would be about 2 million deaths.
But the number of Covid deaths in the USA is probably only a bit past 1 million, putting the IFR in the 0.005–0.008 range.
0.012 is a substantially higher estimate of IFR than any recent expert estimate. 0.005 would already be a very high IFR!
Covid is a scary, scary disease. Deadly, highly contagious even before symptoms, and indistinguishable from common respiratory diseases during the part of the infection when most spread happens.
Most estimates of the ratio of asymptomatic/minor-symptoms people are >=80%.
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