03-11-2020, 05:45 PM
(03-11-2020, 05:14 PM)Mickey123 Wrote: The 2% mortality rate figure is not accurate.
It is derived by dividing the number of deaths by the number of confirmed cases. But there are far more people who have the virus than the number of confirmed cases. There are lots of people with mild symptoms or even no symptoms who never show up at a hospital and nobody finds out they had the virus.
The problem is that right now, nobody knows exactly how many people actually have or have had the virus, and we don't know enough about it to estimate yet. The true mortality rate is going to be less than 2%, but we don't know how much less.
The WHO now says the fatality rate is 3.4% worldwide. Meanwhile, South Korea, using the same calculation for their own country, gets a mortality rate of 0.6%. The mortality rates are much more a function of how much testing is being done than of actual, real mortality rate.
By comparison, using the same metric of deaths divided by confirmed cases, this season's flu would be calculated to have a mortality rate of 10-25% in the US. Yet, we believe the real mortality rate of the flu is around 0.1%, because we have a reasonably reliable extrapolation on which to estimate the true number of cases and the true mortality rate.
We just don't know enough to know the true mortality rate for Covid-19. South Korea has done some random testing, and a simple extrapolation suggests that the mortality rate can't be lower than 0.002%, but that's a pretty low minimum, well below flu.
We do know that almost all the mortality falls in the higher age groups, 70+ or especially 80+.