The thing is, “lots of people had it and didn’t know” doesn’t help anybody who gets sick. The infection rate and the mortality rate can go up and down in inverse proportion and it doesn’t change anything.
Not exactly. We do know for certain that the mortality rate in Italy was higher due to the sudden influx of critical patients overburdening the hospital system. Subsequent hot spots have used that knowledge to demand expansion of ICU beds, which appears to have helped in New York. For hospitalization rate peaks that happened only 2-3 weeks apart, that’s pretty rapid learning.
We can also monitor places like South Korea that had low infection and mortality rates as they reduce restriction to model the best timing for reducing restrictions in other areas.
Well I mean, if we subsequently discover from antibody tests that lots more people in Italy had it than we knew about, then their infection rate (sick ÷ population) will retroactively go up, and their mortality rate (dead ÷ sick) will retroactively go down, but it won’t change anything that happened or anything practical that they learned.
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Yes, but once again, we were responding to someone who was posting misinformation. No one disagrees that we don’t know right now, except that guy. @DukeTrout isn’t advocated that he KNOWS the mortality or morbidity rate, just giving information on how that number is generally arrived at.
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