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 elsewhere aren't overwhelmed. But catching it isn't the immediate death sentence headlines like this indicate.
[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
Assuming that 20% of the US population (330 million) gets it, we're looking at about 13.2 million (20%x20%x330 million) patients who require admission to an ICU ward. Needless to say, that is enough to overwhelm the healthcare system and hospitals, and increase the overall mortality rate, when people who requires ICU are turned away due to lack of beds or equipment.
As it is, the best option would be to delay the spread as much as possible, so that the number would be spread across a time-span for as long as possible.
This is kinda where I'm at right now. The true mortality rate is almost certainly well below the 3% being reported now due to a high number of mild unreported cases. That said, the speed with which it is spreading combined with the potential severity is cause for concern.
If we compare this to the previous SARS and MERS events the trajectory is worrying. The SARS epidemic lasted 19 months and resulted in 8400 confirmed cases. The MERS epidemic has been ongoing since 2012 (very few cases after 2015 though) and resulted in 2500 confirmed cases. The current Coronavirus epidemic has only been going for a little over 2 months and we're already over 80,000 confirmed cases with no indication of a slowdown.
As a counterpoint though, from October through December of last year, there were 3.7 million cases of the flu in the US alone.
If you charge $1,400 to each suspected person then either the testing will bankrupt the population or people are going to hide from testing. If coronavirus arrives in bulk in the US, then it's either going to be "Medicare for coughs for everyone" or a pandemic.
With the deaths in Italy it is now also unclear if one person actually died from COVID-19 or if it was the late stage cancer they had.
There is an interesting thought experiment here. Hospitals are a large vector for spreading the disease. On the individual level you'd want to stay away from them as much as you can. On the collective level, that behavior is counter-productive ofc.
[0] ACE2 Expression in Kidney and Testis May Cause Kidney and Testis Damage After 2019-nCoV Infection https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...
It's also quite plausible the Hubei numbers are being scrutinized and processed differently (perhaps with input or oversight from the central government) whereas the other provinces are relying more on local provincial officials' reporting. There is a high incentive for these officials to avoid reporting negative news, so a bias towards low numbers would not be surprising.
We should rely more on international numbers instead of Chinese ones and particularly look askew at the China ex-Hubei numbers.
eg from Jan 26
>Prof Neil Ferguson, a public health expert at Imperial College, said his “best guess” was that there were 100,000 affected by the virus even though there are only 2,000 confirmed cases so far https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-...
We are you contradicting what we know? This needs a good reason. We've even been through this stage in Hubei, it started low if you just superficially look at figures.
"In the early stages of the SARS epidemic, health officials estimated the mortality rate at less than 4%. More recently, officials have cited rates in the 6% to 7% range. Today's SARS figures from the WHO—6,903 cumulative cases and 495 deaths—point to a case-fatality ratio of 7.2%. But WHO officials note that this calculation underestimates the rate, since some currently ill patients will die of the disease."
(2003) http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/05/estimates...
Right, that's why I used Guangdong as an example, and not (say) Korea or Japan, and compared cases 2 weeks ago vs deaths now. How long a lag time do you think is better?
Is this a typo or are they politicizing SARS here so people think it’s something else?
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.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19545404/
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122
One reason that many people don't seem to be "taking this seriously" is because the narrative of people who keep fearmongering about COVID-19 just doesn't make sense.
There are still direct flights from China to many countries, and they're not empty.
Screening is mostly based on taking people's temperature with handheld devices that have twice registered my temperature as 32C (no, I wasn't rushed to a hospital). Where more reliable screening has been implemented, there have been many documented failures.
Many quarantine protocols are voluntary / honour-based. People from cruise ships where they were exposed to others who were infected have dispersed worldwide with varying levels of monitoring (in some cases none).
If this thing was half as deadly and easily-spread as continues to be claimed on the Internet, 200 new cases in Italy wouldn't be international news at this point.
From what I’ve heard, CIVID-19 has symptoms very similar to the flu.
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.
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
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
What are they doing?
- emptying supermarkets and fighting for products that finish instead of waiting for the shelves to be refurbished (with police interventions, etc.). I've seen people buy 20kg of pasta or 100 water bottles on Sunday
- buying cleaning products and useless face masks for 10+ times the price
- firmly believing that COVID-19 is a military plan or a disease made to kill old and sick people to lower costs
- avoiding all Chinese people, Chinese food or Chinese shops (some people are afraid of goods made in China)
- faking some other illness to avoid going to work
And we could go on with a lot of other senseless things people are doing...
Edit: formatting
E.g. it includes self reported cases and estimated using infection rates. (R0 mostly.) It does not exist when mode of infection is not entirely clear it when number of cases are low.
Case Fatality Rate is number of deaths divided by number of confirmed cases, which are usually hospitalizations.
Mortality Rate is usually much lower than Case Fatality Rate.
