Yes indeed. Many deaths – currently the vast majority, pehaps – will merely be moved to a slightly earlier date. Politically it looks bad though.
Today’s news is that 1/3 of UK cases are in London. Apparently 900 in hospital, so the hospitals there must be manic, and this is only the beginning, with pubs and bars still crowded.
The worrying thing is that 5% of people under 40 or so need hospital care and this is independent of age below that number. Data posted earlier IIRC. Even though most younger people recover, presumably they would not without medical care.
What is the correct name of this virus? Today at least 3 names are used: Corona, COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2.
The name of the virus is SARS-CoV-2. The name of the disease caused by this virus in COVID-19.
Cobalt wrote:
If the fatality rate is 0.8 percent and nearly everyone gets it, sixty million will die, and there will be almost twice as many funerals than in a normal year.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Assuming that deaths from Covid-19 are independent of deaths from other causes which clearly they are not
Fair point, in many instances it will bring death forward by days, months or a few years “only”. So let’s assume 90% of all cases are of that nature. But still – translated to Sweden, of around 80,000 people dying (say, Umea), 8,000 will be otherwise healthy.
And to use the typical standard “this is no worse than ” comparisons
– road deaths in Sweden – around 300 per year
– influenza in Sweden – 500-2000 per year (can’t find data on the top of the range, though)
Fatality rate is over 0.8%, look at Italy figures. It’s a complex figure with a lot of variation, with first the number of ventilated beds, I think. And were they are saturated, death rate climb.
Fatality rate is 0.8% if you can treat nearly all of the serious, but survivable (with ICU treatment) cases. If it’s just allowed to rip through the population, the death rate will be greater than 0.8% because you can’t even hope to treat most of the serious cases and will have to just allow a lot of people who could otherwise survive to die. The UK government reckons that if that was done in the UK, half a million would die by the end of this year. This cannot be compared to traffic accidents. If you want to compare half a million dying to something, it’s rougly comparable to dropping a strategic (megaton+) nuclear bomb on Bristol.
greg_mp wrote:
Fatality rate is over 0.8%, look at Italy figures.
The fatality rate as a proportion of known cases varies a lot between different countries. I made a quick calculation for 10 west european countries. About half had a rate less than 0.5%. A handful had a rate an order of magnitude larger, i.e. Italy 8.3%, Spain 4.3%, UK 2.7%.
I’m a bit puzzled about these large differences. It seems unlikely that they can be explained only by different health care or demography. Could the reason simply be a difference in the number of unknown cases?
alioth wrote:
Fatality rate is 0.8% if you can treat nearly all of the serious, but survivable (with ICU treatment) cases. If it’s just allowed to rip through the population, the death rate will be greater than 0.8% because you can’t even hope to treat most of the serious cases and will have to just allow a lot of people who could otherwise survive to die. The UK government reckons that if that was done in the UK, half a million would die by the end of this year. This cannot be compared to traffic accidents. If you want to compare half a million dying to something, it’s rougly comparable to dropping a strategic (megaton+) nuclear bomb on Bristol.
This. Thank you for this concise summary. The fatality rate looks small (though, remember, for Influenza it is around 0,1% and that still killed 25000 people in Germany alone during the winter of 2017/2018) but will rise dramatically once ICU capacity is exceeded (which is what happened in Italy).
Then it is important to remember this:
Peter wrote:
The worrying thing is that 5% of people under 40 or so need hospital care and this is independent of age below that number. Data posted earlier IIRC. Even though most younger people recover, presumably they would not without medical care.
This is actually the most problematic fact about SARS2-CoV. 5% of those who will get it and are under 40 and otherwise healthy still need critical care to recover. If they are careless and get infected quickly and in droves, their mortality rate will rise above 0,8% and get closer to 5% the more dramatically the health care system is overwhelmed…
Airborne_Again wrote:
I’m a bit puzzled about these large differences. It seems unlikely that they can be explained only by different health care or demography. Could the reason simply be a difference in the number of unknown cases?
I think it is very early to say, most of the analysis will just explain the number with whatever reason: healthcare system, number of cases tested, demographic,
There is also a huge bias depending on where each country sits on epidemic stages, the number of total recovered is indicative of the technical timing difficulties to calculate fatality rates (has to be estimated on new cases and deaths on those new cases, e.g. fatality rate for a given case), while all what we can see now is cumulative identified cases (not total infected) and cumulative deaths, so things are highly sensitive to data timing, new tests and time lags…early in January, it was estimated at 17% in Hubei but now it is around 0.7% as of the rest of China
The differences in apparent mortality rates depend very largely on how widespread testing is. Here in the UK only a tiny fraction of infected people are being tested, whereas is Germany testing is very aggressive. I suspect the number of people infected, or already recovering, is at least 10 times the number officially reported.
