Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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As we have seen in Italy, in some towns, the number of deaths is more than 4 times, as compared to last year's number. What does this mean? It means a lot of people died at home, either from COVID-19 or from other illnesses. The health system was overwhelmed, so I don't think they did any postmortem sampling to check who had the virus.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/02/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-likely-much-higher-than-reported/

By now, we are pretty sure this virus is at very least twice as deadly as seaonal flu, and most likely 4 times as deadly.

So, I did a quick calculation. If we take the mortality rate as 0.4% (four times the mortality rate of seasonal flu), then we can infer how many people are truly infected with COVID-19 in Italy. Bear with me a bit. There are currently 16,523 deaths in Italy, according to WorldOMeters. However, this figure lags behind the confirmed cases. So, we have to extrapolate a bit, like by 7 days or so. Italy's death doubling period is currently around 15 days. So in another 7 days the multiplicative factor is around 1.4 (the square root of 2). The number additional deaths not reported in hospitals is a factor 3~4 in heavily hit towns. Let's be conservative and use a factor 2.5 for the entire country. So, we can infer the total number of people in Italy infected with COVID-19 as

16,523*2.5*1.4/0.004 = 14.5 million people

Italy has a population of 60 million people. This means 24% of the population has already been infected. So, there is no surprise to see that "herd immunity" has started to kick in. For COVID-19, given that R0~3, to achieve herd immunity, you need 1-1/R0=67% of people having immunity. I think the 24% figure is consistent with what we see in the situation in Italy: number of cases starting to dwindling down fast, due to partial herd immunity.

In other words, I believe there is some basis to suspect that the true mortality rate of COVID-19 is 0.4%, or four times deadlier that the seasonal flu.

A Bloomberg opinion article doesn't do it for me. I need something official produced by a government agency to go by.

I think you're constructing a strawman right now.
None of us says covid isn't mild in vast majority of its cases.
That's exactly why it spreads so easily.

^That actually could be true. There could be cases where COVID19 aggravated an underlying condition. There could even be cases where COVID19, despite its presence, had little to do with a person’s death.

But the spike in hospital admissions for COVID19 is obvious within a NYC context.

The morbidity (illness) and mortality figures are both certainly excessive in New York City. Based on hospital admissions and hospital deaths.

What do the offcial government records say?

The NY Post and your calculations are not something I can go by. I need cold hard offcial numbers to draw solid conclusions.

The New York Post is a well-established CONSERVATIVE newspaper. They have no interest in promoting a liberal agenda.

It was founded by Alexander Hamilton, after all.

Bloomberg might be liberal as far as gun control is concerned...but he is conservative in many other ways.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 07 Apr 2020, 8:37 am, edited 2 times in total.

I was not attempting to use it as an argument. It is just something that came to mind.

It is not a government agency in charge of keeping records. It is a secondary source. Fox is CONSERVATIVE too and I think it's crap for the most part. That's not the issue.

Www1.nyc.gov compiles statistics on positive Coronavirus tests, hospital admissions, and deaths in NYC twice daily.

Most likely, the Department of Health compiles comprehensive data on hospital admissions and deaths for all causes in New York City.

I don't care for the opinion but for the data it uses, which gives "Source: Comune di Bergamo, L'Eco di Bergamo
Note: 2020 is as of March 26."
The data is coherent with other papers:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN21J677
https://www.ansa.it/english/news/2020/0 ... 70ec5.html
The common source is ISTAT, Italian National Institute of Statistics.
The source pages of ISTAT are unnavigable for me, likely because I don't speak Italian.

Anything .gov is good. Maybe not infallible but at least offcial. You know me, I have the lawyer-like admissible / inadmissible mindset.

51 people so far in South Korea who were cleared of the virus, recovered from the virus, test positive again prompting some to wonder if the tests that cleared them were faulty or not sensitive enough to pick up low levels of the virus or...the virus never left and then proliferated a second time; a "flare up".

I still believe we know far too little about this virus and it's possible that it's more dangerous and more damaging than we think it is at present.

If it turns out that the virus stays in the body at low levels only to come back again (and again?) that would be a profoundly different scenario than a "get sick then recover" scenario we're assuming at present.

Last edited by Magna on 07 Apr 2020, 9:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, that's the problem, we need to act but we know too little.
This is the natural setting for a phenomenon called panic.
And this is what we can observe, on many levels.
Unfortunately, while panic is an adaptive reaction to poorly understood immediate danger, it is counterproductive on the scale of whole societes.

^ I agree that panic is something that should be avoided and that a rounded perspective is important; however, I believe having an attitude like I do that it's possible this virus could be more dangerous than we think it is at this point and acknowledging that isn't panic at all.

As of 2020-04-07, at 06:42:07 AM

7,8000,000,000 Global Population (appr.)
1,363,365 Confirmed Cases
292,188 Recoveries
76,420 Deaths

That's:

• 0.0175% of the global population is known to be infected with CoViD-19.

• A ratio of 793 recoveries for every 207 deaths (~4:1).

Data Source: Johns Hopkins University

I think America places it in this paradigm externalizing responsibility when perhaps one is referring to internal mindset and individual initiative. Balance isn't achieved by extremes