“for Americans infected with the coronavirus, the chance of dying appears to be less than 1 in 100.”
How is that even news?
Estimates for the infection fatality rate in places with functioning hospital systems have been hovering between 0.4% and 1% at least since some time in April, if not longer.
That’s still not harmless. I’m guessing at least 30,000 people have died in the US alone since i personally was aware of the fact that the fatality risk is most likely not more than 1%.
It probably is a fact. The “less lethal than first thought” part is true as well, estimates were “up to 4%” in the beginning.
But they haven’t been near 4% for a long time, and 0,4% is plenty. “0.4% - 1% and a few hundred thousand already dead worldwide” is a lot scarier as “0.04% - 4%, and the Chinese government has locked down one city.”
And that’s why that kind of reporting is bad. By framing it as “than first thought”, it tells a story of science being wrong, and suggests that some of the existing measures might have been unnecessary.
My current theory about journalism and Coronavirus is that there are exactly three kinds of science reporting: Bad science reporting about Coronavirus (49.99%), the kind of reporting that doesn’t even try (49.99%), and interviews with Prof. Christian Drosten. As most of the latter are in German, maybe there’s an English-language equivalent that I don’t know about yet, but that seems to be about it…
Austria’s numbers are looking good, and we’re opening up again. But a lot of people don’t understand the concept of opening up carefully. The idea that there is no immediate danger for individuals but we need to be careful collectively seems to be very hard to grasp. At least we’ve got some room for mistakes now…
I propose the Skittles Test (or M&Ms test, your choice): here is a bag with 1000 Skittles in it. 970 of them are perfectly harmless. 26 of them will put you in bed as sick as you’ve ever been in your life and, and of those 17 will leave you with health problems for the rest of your life. The remaining four will kill you.
According to the numbers at worldometers.info, the seven-day average for deaths right now, divided by the highest average for new cases over the last three weeks, is about 4% in the U.S.
“Total deaths” divided by “total cases” is about 6%
I guess I have to read the article to hear about how somebody says they have better numbers and then we all argue about whether their numbers are really better and whether it even matters.
It’s not like the fatalities are just going to go away. The only way the death rate goes down is if cases go up, as in mild, undiagnosed cases getting added in, and those numbers aren’t really relevant. They don’t make the pandemic better or worse, they’re just a kind of noise.
if i don’t eat the skittles will the mars candy company flub its sales numbers and will the third wealthiest family in america ( $89.7 billion at last accounting ) lose any cash?
i really don’t want to die, but i also don’t want to leave our wealthiest families destitute.
how about this? if i eat the candies, will you give them another tax break? they’re really hurting(1) right now.
That’s the case fatality rate. The infection fatality rate can’t be measured as easily, because you’d need to know how many people are actually infected without being tested. Which is why there is a lot of guesswork, and the probable range for the number is only slowly narrowing.
How is this just noise? If, in a town of 10,000 people, you’ve got 100 deaths and 9900 people who had it and survived, then it’s over. If, in the same town, you’ve got 100 deaths and only 900 people who had it and survived, then you you need to be afraid of 900 more deaths to come.
It’s also something you need to know when you’re trying to control the spread of the disease. We now know you can’t get away with ‘just’ testing & isolating people who are showing symptoms.
In short, I think it’s one of the most important numbers we want to know about the damn thing.
Good. Now that Austria is opening up, the local internet forums are full of people claiming all sorts of things in the name of “reason” or “science”, so I’ve stopped reading between the lines. Sorry…
I don’t get the stupidity of hiding the virus. Your state may open but the rest of the world isn’t going to want to have anything to do with any place that its still a hot spot. No country will open travel to/from the US if even one state is having out of control outbreaks.
Active case data is pretty unreliable, and is probably better off ignored when provided. There are too many ways that it can be defined, and since the majority of people have mild cases and recover at home it is hard to spend already thin resources to go follow up on people who aren’t that sick.
Its better as suggested by smulder to simply consider the new cases in the last few weeks “active”, but to also look at hospital and intensive care occupancy – which are generally reported somewhere but not usually on the large scale trackers.
citation needed. active case counts are the best way of tracking the spread of the virus.
no, it doesn’t matter how sick a person is when you talk about controlling the spread. if anything the more mild the case the more worrisome. those people go out into the world and spread it, the people in hospitals do not.
the worst carriers are the healthy, asymptomatic carriers - which is exactly why the spread is as bad as it is. the only ways to combat this are: isolation, testing, and contract tracing.
that’s the established scientific and medical advice
As far as I know, It is highly likely that there is immunity for at least a limited time.
If that time is long enough, the virus might even die out in my hypothetical example town. If it is not, the virus will keep circulating. So then, it wouldn’t be over. But the worst part would still be over, and it’s still vastly preferable to the other scenario. And that was the whole point I was trying to make. Infection fatality rate is a number that we should care about.
But just to reduce the risk of being misinterpreted by other people reading this, I’ll repeat: No, the fact that IFR likely to be below 1% is not news any more, it does not mean that it is harmless or that any of the lockdown measures are/were unnecessary.
Maybe not the world, but people from other states will flock in.
Wait a few weeks until Disney is open. That would be an interesting trace - where those people come from, where they go to, how many are walking hot spots on vacation from responsibility, et c.
I’m not talking about undetected cases. This is about people who had mild symptoms or were identified as exposed, were tested and found positive but not warranting hospitalization. They are directed to recover at home under quarantine, but we don’t necessarily record or even have a good way to determine when they are recovered. We aren’t even sure at what stage testing tells you if someone is still contagious. And if recovered means no more symptoms, then that is irrelevant for exactly the reasons you describe.
In the US, it might be a strategy to hold onto power as well as wealth. There are key states in the next election where support for the current administration is decreasing:
(from the article)
Trump’s approval rating with seniors also plummeted 20 points from March to April.
people older than 45 cast a higher share of the 2016 vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida than their age bracket did nationally
If TPTB believe fewer older voters in November will improve their chances of winning, we’ll probably see more efforts to jeopardize their health.
what you’re really talking about is “recovered cases”, and yes:
the number of people who currently have an active virus is not nearly as accurate as the number of people who have tested positive as having an active virus when they took their test.
but to say that the “active case data is unreliable” is misleading.
in a lab setting, the nose swab test has a 100% accuracy on positive samples, and a 96% accuracy on negative samples. in the wild, it’s estimated that maybe one in three have a false negative[1].
while that’s not great, it still lets people establish an accurate minimum for the confirmed active case count.
