There is more than the death rate, tilly. Again, this has all been explained. . . . time and time agin. The infection rate is an important factor. The lack of a vaccine is an important factor. I respect your wish to be optimistic; I really do. But the evidence continually indicates that this is much more devastating than the flu. One chart shows how many Americans are dying from the coronavirus each week compared with other common causes of death like heart disease, cancer, and the flu
Ah ok. The death rate is much less important to me than overall deaths. If the rate is 0.1% but 60% get it that's still 216k dead. That alone prices to me that all of this was worth it.
My concern with that study is it seems far more likely that means the antibody testing is popping a fair amount of false positives. That could be a very big problem if the goal is to utilize that to try to keep people safe. I do think that our stated infection rate is way higher than the official numbers, but I doubt it is anywhere near that degree. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd probably put it about an order of magnitude lower, although wouldn't be shocked about it being double that or so.
Flu death rate 2018-2019=.0096 (34,157 deaths/35,520,883 symptomatic illnesses) Flu symptom rate 1040 times more than flu death Covid-19 (based on estimate in tweet up thread= .60 Covid-19 symptom rate (based on tweet estimate) 8 times more than death rate Covid-19 62.5 times more deadly than flu, even at this much lower number. #nottheflu
Good data Mutz, but that all goes out the window if antibody testing shows anything close to the preliminary numbers. (I agree that Santa Clara is a unique sample), so time will tell, but it ...could...be some good news.
Within a week or so, 0.1% of the population of the entire state of New York will have died of this. That's about 20,000 people in a state of about 20 million people. So for COVID-19 to have the same mortality rate as typical flu does (0.1%), we'd have to assume that every single person in the state of NY has been infected. I doubt that is the case.
We will have to wait till this one is almost done to fairly compare peak times. I should have said has any seasonal flu gone from 1 death to 40k in 60 days.
I agree....and again...I was speaking PURELY about death rate. I failed to say that in he original post, but have said it several time since. Sorry if I was not clear.
Valid point. You would also have to assume that this disease acts the exact same way in every environment. 99% of us don't live right on top of each other.
TY, supertilly! I'm all for positive news. Just urge caution re: over-interpretation/overgeneralizing. Even if this winds up being closer to flu death rates, it will still be a major threat until we have a vaxx & treatments, unless somehow like SARS it just up and disappears (as Fauci explained about why we don't have a SARS vaxx). I also think because we tend to think of the flu as perhaps only a little worse than a common cold, we fool ourselves a bit. And if this is true, it's easy to imagine people not getting proper treatment, perhaps until it's too late. So maybe instead of thinking the Covid-19 is more like the flu, we should think the flu is more like Covid-19? .nah mean?
Don’t know the details of that Stanford study. I really like the idea behind it. Maybe this was addressed, but it could have suffered from selection bias where people who felt they may have been exposed were more likely to volunteer to get tested.
