If you look at the breakdown of infections vs deaths in China[1], you'll see that the death rate outside of Hubei is <i>far</i> lower than the death rate inside. As of yesterday, Guangdong, for instance, has had 1345 confirmed cases, but only 6 deaths -- in spite of the fact that at least 800 of those had been exposed more than 2 weeks ago[2].<p>The most likely explanation to me is that the hospitals in Hubei have been overwhelmed. Obviously that means we should be vigilant about limiting the spread of the disease, so that hospitals <i>elsewhere</i> aren't overwhelmed. But catching it isn't the immediate death sentence headlines like this indicate.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200224-sitrep-35-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=1ac4218d_2" rel="nofollow">https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200204-sitrep-15-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=88fe8ad6_4" rel="nofollow">https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...</a>
Well... I'm in my hometown in Italy right now, people are advised to work remotely or avoid mass transit, everything closes after 6PM, museums/theaters/schools are closed, a small percentage of the population is going a little crazy so please everyone we must start asking ourselves some questions about those wild numbers that come out and people reporting them must be a little bit more responsible.<p>We had 7 fatalities here in Italy in an really big area, all of those people were old (some very old) and with other aggressive diseases or health problems going on, but we keep saying we have 200something people positive to COVID-19 making the mortality rate 3.5% BUT those 7 people are absolutely not representative of the 3.5% of total population so we must be missing people that are positive to the virus but don't get tested and never will.<p>We don't have enough test kits, we don't have enough personnel, we cannot overwhelm every lab in northern Italy just to start testing everyone for COVID-19 so many people without symptoms or with light symptoms are going on with their lives without ever being reported as positive... you get tested if:
- you met with someone that died
- you have severe symptoms
- you have light symptoms and you are old or have some other disease
- you live in one of the (really small) isolated areas
- you escape from the areas that are isolated
- you are close to someone that have escaped<p>If you are young and have a cold, even if you want to get tested, no one will come. I know from first hand some 4 people that are sick right now (symptoms like normal cold or a mild influenza) and one person that had I bad influenza finishing last week... are they positive? We will never know, now scale that up to the millions of people living in northern Italy
I'm confused, I thought that what the paper defines as <i>Mortality Rate</i> is called <i>Case Fatality Rate</i>. Could someone explain to me what the difference is?
I still would like to see the age repartition and most importantly a study on unreported cases.<p>From what I’ve heard, CIVID-19 has symptoms very similar to the flu.
4.8% is pretty alarming..! wouldn't there be an inherent bias, though, towards patients that display such severe symptoms that they would require medical care? Currently, to me at least, these cases in Italy seem to indicate that plenty of cases go unnoticed because many of those infected show few to no symptoms (which makes this virus all the harder to isolate)
What's a morality rate? Is it a typo or an actual indicator? I found this: <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/population-development/tag/morality-rate/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/population-development/tag/mora...</a> but it seems to be a typo.
Please update the title to remove the typo (s/morality/mortality), from the abstract: "the mortality rate of patients with 2019-nCoV infection was 4.8%".
“The mortality rate of patients with 2019-nCoV infection was lower than that of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SRAS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).”<p>Is this a typo or are they politicizing SARS here so people think it’s something else?
Ok, is <i>now</i> a good time to start taking this seriously?<p>Spanish Flu had an R0 of about 2[1]. Current published estimates for 2019-ncov are 2.3-3.8 for this paper [1] and there's another floating around which gets as high as 6-8.<p>1. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19545404/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19545404/</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122</a>