It gets hospital-level serious for 20% of cases? I thought the lethality rate wasn’t even that high for the most at-risk demographics (something like 14%).
Yes, hospital-level serious for 20% of cases. 5-10% require ICU care. The ~2% fatality rate is with ICU support and ventilation. When the hospitals get overrun it increases to ~7%, which is what we saw in Wuhan and now Italy. Your chance of dying if you do need hospitalization but don't get it appears to be > 50%.
Death rates by age range also assume ICU care. It's virtually unheard of for healthy middle-aged people if they have access to good medical care, but plenty of 30- and 40-somethings can and have died from it once the hospitals are overrun.
It’s far from clear how accurate those numbers for Italy and China are. China essentially gave up on testing the general population in Wuhan and their numbers mostly represent the most serious cases. Italy’s infections seem to be mostly centered around the elderly with 40% of infections in the 70+ age range despite 65+ year olds only representing 21.53% of their population.
China plainly lied about the outcomes of the SARS epidemic and reported about half the fatality rate of nearly every other country. Hell, no Chinese person I've talked with recently believes the official numbers.
I flagged this because it was published in January nearly a month earlier than the WHO's verification.
Essentially this was not in bad faith when it was published but it is now so out of date and misleading and sharing it now is dangerous in that it may cause people to ignore safety advice.
It was a nowcast. It's intended to be out of date after a while. And provide an estimation at the time. I don't understand how it is dangerous, could you explain that?... earlier action would have been better.
You are claiming that a study published in January supercedes a study in February.
Given that people are making difficult choices right now that will impact the course of the epidemic we should be very careful sharing outdated information that could lead to people becoming infected.
China's numbers are a minimum. Many people are saying online they are a maximum. I.e. claiming that there are lots of hidden mild infections when there are not.
> You are claiming that a study published in January supercedes a study in February.
No, I am no. I am saying the study supercedes numbers reported by authorities. The point of the study was to scatter information on very opaque reporting.
> China's numbers are a minimum. Many people are saying online they are a maximum. I.e. claiming that there are lots of hidden mild infections when there are not.
Death rate was under 1% outside of Wuhan and in South Korea. It's over 5% within Wuhan and in Italy.
The way I interpreted that discrepancy is that in the presence of full testing and good ICU care, the death rate from COVID-19 is about 0.7-1%. When the hospitals get overloaded, as they've been in Wuhan and Italy, the death rate skyrockets to 5-10%. This also squares roughly with the number of people who need ICU care in places where the death rate is low. If you need ICU care and don't get it, presumably you'll be dead.
Median death is 14 days after first symptoms with many cases taking significantly longer. That combined with an exponential growth curve looks significantly less deadly. A major discrepancy is the under detection of cases as full population testing has been rare outside of the cruse ships which also have an elderly population.
> It gets hospital-level serious for 20% of cases? I thought the lethality rate wasn’t even that high for the most at-risk demographics (something like 14%).
Well, substantially all of the cases that end up dying go to the hospital first, and many more besides that and up recovering. It shouldn't be surprising that the hospitalization rate is higher than the fatality rate.
About 15-20% require hospital care of some kind. Then depending on how prepared/overrun the health care system is, 0.6-5% cases are fatal. These numbers are ballpark and the lack of data makes it hard to know with confidence. The CFR gets more severe with age and comorbidities.
