> We DO know that 10M people have had it, and 500K have died. That's 5%. We're still guessing everything else.
No, the only thing we know is that 500K have died. At least 10M people have had it. 10M is the lower bound. The upper bound could be 30M+. How many cases are asymptomatic, or otherwise just untested/unreported? 5% is the upper bound for the mortality rate. Actual mortality rate is going to be significantly lower, perhaps even <1%.
>>um mortality rate is something like 1% ... hardly high
Mortality is 100%...for the person that dies from it. And that 1% rate is so far, I hope we don't see what happens if 46 million people in USA get it and try going to the hospital.
> 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.
> Wow this is the first I've heard of the infection and death rate being 'lower than hyped'.
GP only said the death rate was lower (which necessarily means the infection rate is higher, not lower, assuming all the deaths used in the reported rate are real deaths associated with the disease of concern.)
> 5% of people that get it (among a wide range of ages) require serious medical care for weeks
Just based on the experience in other countries, GP seems quite spot on in terms of who is impacted, who dies, and the percentage of the population. Your comment seems speculative and substantial number of non-70+ year olds dying has not been borne out by the data at all.
> Why are stats like that not shared? That seems like very valuable information. Hospitalization rates should be one of the main stats being shared, imo.
Because it’s in the neighborhood of 15% worst case needing hospitalization. You’ve already got enough people blowing off quarantine measures, so no one is terribly eager to share that of the people who DO get the virus, 85% don’t require hospitalization. I get the reasoning from a public policy perspective, but I agree that information should be made a bit more easily accessible.
> 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.
Yes, most people studied were symptomatic, so asymptomatic people weren't checked.
> The closest you can get is looking at Diamond Princess, where everyone was exposed and as of right now 6 of 3700 died, and that’s in a population skewing elderly.
First, we can't be sure that everyone was exposed to the disease. Even if we assume that everyone was exposed, then I still interpret the numbers differently from you: first, patients on Diamond Princess were subject to medical attention so they likely saved many lives, and second, A total number of 705 of 3700 people became ill enough to be able to confirm the disease on them, the same category of people the 1.4% or the 15% were calculated on. So assume for a moment that 1 out of 5 people exposed become confirmably ill. Even if you divide the number of deaths by 5, it's still a large number and larger than influenza or other diseases.
> If you look at the raw numbers nearly twice as many of the hospitalized are vaccinated.
This doesn't mean what you think it means. Imagine if 100% of the population were vaccinated, what percentage of the hospitalized would then be vaccinated?
> You get that the hospitals were being overrun by people dying of covid, right?
When I looked up the (official) statistics for my country, Germany, for the peak period in 2021, the percentage of covid cases in hospitals was about 5%. The news at that time made it seem as if it were 95%.
The number of people that have it is under reported, so the death rate and hospitalization rates are exaggerated.
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