Nobody knows if it's 5-10x more deadly because nobody knows the denominator - the _total_ number of cases, including the cases which are mild (which most of them are), and for which people are unlikely to seek treatment. Also, even allowing hypothetically that it's 5x as deadly in China, that doesn't mean its CFR is the same in the developed world.
Do you have grandparents? Or elderly parents? Or know anyone over the age of 60-70 that you care about? Or anyone with a compromised immunological system?
If yes to any of these questions you should at least empathise that maybe they might suffer from a new and unknown disease that is potentially deadly to them.
Not everyone is going to die but a lot of people will feel the effects of this uncontained epidemic in their personal lives, don't you care about that?
Yes, western countries should not deceive themselves about the standard of care. Bruce Aylward of WHO says that they rapidly scaled up to world-leading capability [1]:
they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.
The more that comes out about China's response, the more I fear that it will be hard for anyone else to follow, and not just or primarily due to the severe quarantine. China snapped its fingers and went to a wartime footing.
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5-10x more deadly than influenza is “only slightly worse”?
Nobody knows if it's 5-10x more deadly because nobody knows the denominator - the _total_ number of cases, including the cases which are mild (which most of them are), and for which people are unlikely to seek treatment. Also, even allowing hypothetically that it's 5x as deadly in China, that doesn't mean its CFR is the same in the developed world.
The denominator was estimated by multiple teams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22405204 That's why we are fairly confident in the approximative CFR range of 0.5%-1.6% See more details in all the studies I link to in my post at: https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/#updates--...
Sounds about right. But that's not "we're all gonna die" estimate of 5x-10x.
Yes it is. 0.5-1.6% means the coronavirus is 5x-16x deadlier than the flu (0.1%)
So the fatality, at the upper end of the range, would be comparable to the 1918 pandemic flu (estimated at 2.04%: https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an...)
Do you have grandparents? Or elderly parents? Or know anyone over the age of 60-70 that you care about? Or anyone with a compromised immunological system?
If yes to any of these questions you should at least empathise that maybe they might suffer from a new and unknown disease that is potentially deadly to them.
Not everyone is going to die but a lot of people will feel the effects of this uncontained epidemic in their personal lives, don't you care about that?
Wuhan is pretty developed. Turns out level of development means very little when the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ICU beds.
Feel free to cite any other scientific study that establishes a lower CFR, by the way.
Yes, western countries should not deceive themselves about the standard of care. Bruce Aylward of WHO says that they rapidly scaled up to world-leading capability [1]:
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/3/2/21161067/coronavirus-covid19-ch...
The more that comes out about China's response, the more I fear that it will be hard for anyone else to follow, and not just or primarily due to the severe quarantine. China snapped its fingers and went to a wartime footing.
So nobody knows, but somehow you know better?