I'd like this mainly to be a statistical/mathematical discussion based on the present data about Covid19.
My question is: at what point in time did we know that Covid19 is killing more people than usual, based on the statistics?<p>My understanding is that the people that are counted as Covid19 deaths are those that were tested Covid 19-positive and then died from Pneumonia related health issues. However, Covid19 is possibly not the only Virus that can lead to Pneumonia and a person could be infected with multiple Viruses at the same time (I guess).
Do we also test if a Covid19 positive person has the current influenza Virus in them, for example?
Assume that all Covid19 patients also had the Influenza Virus in them, which might cause similar symptoms, then how do we know if a person should be counted towards "Covid19 death" or "Influenza death"? Or do we only count people to "Covid19 deaths" that only carried the Covid19 virus (and we specifically tested for other viruses)?<p>Also, I can't find base rates on the number of pneumonia deaths each year in Wuhan and the speed with which those are usually rising to determine how bad things really are.
What are the models that are used to determine how bad things are when a new Virus is being found and at what point do we usually know that a newly found Virus is bad?<p>Overall I would like to know: how likely is it, that we would have never found anything being wrong just based on the people that die from Pneumonia related issues this year if we had never found Covid19? And with what confidence can we answer that question?
> how likely is it, that we would have never found anything being wrong just based on the people that die from Pneumonia related issues this year if we had never found Covid19?<p>0%. Just read the reports from Wuhan and Italy. For example, citing from <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/</a>:<p>March 20 (GMT)<p>Italy: in the city of Bergamo, there were 108 more deaths in the first 15 days of March this year compared to 2019 (164 deaths in 2020 vs. 56 deaths in 2019) according to the mayor of the city Giorgio Gori. During this period, 31 deaths were attributed to the coronavirus (less than 30% of the additional deaths this year)<p>"There are significant numbers of people who have died but whose death hasn't been attributed to the coronavirus because they died at home or in a nursing home and so they weren't swabbed," said the mayor [source]<p>March 19 (GMT)<p>Italian army trucks form a long line in the center of Bergamo to transport the coffins from the Bergamo cemetery to cremation sites in other regions, as morgues can't cope with more coronavirus deaths<p>Obituaries in the local newspaper went from 1.5 pages (on Feb. 9) to 10 pages (on March 13)