Why are people freaking out about this? The upper end of the mortality rate is 3% imho that's simply not nearly high enough to garner this kind of reaction. Polio had a 30% mortality rate for adults, let's keep some perspective here.
Yes, perspective matters, so here's another: 3% x number of infections. What fraction of the population were exposed to polio vs what fraction are going to be exposed to coronavirus?
It is the product of these factors which is causing the "freaking out" as you call it.
When the German chancellor is declaring 60% of the population will become infected, you start to get a sense of the scale.
If you look at just first world nations[0], you're talking a total population of 1.04 billion people. 60% of that is 630 million people. 3% of that 60% is 18 million people that could die just in the first world nations.
technically it is not wrong, after all it is backed by actual, true science. That being said, this estimation assumes that nothing will change, so no working counter measures of any kind.
In reality, you have China. They are nowhere near these numbers. In Germany trade show get cancelled, events get cancelled, soccer games take place without spectators, schools close. Quarantine measures will certainly be put in place as well when needed. All this helps to keep infections down and slow the spreading. It worked in China after all.
I am no expert on diseaes, but I did my fair amount of number crunching. And that tell me that just taking the current average of deaths and infections, currently somewhere around 3.4%, extrapolate the number of infections worldwide and multiply the two doesn't fly. At the very least you have to brake down the world population by age groups based on the same groups we have specific mortality rates for. doing so already gives you a better picture and a more realistic number. Nobody who comes up with expected fatalities seems to bother to do so.
Obviously, that leaves the whole impact of counter-measures out of the equation. it doesn't account for time nor for any regionl clusters of people. Neither does it account for any local shortages due to an overwhelmed medical system for certain periods in certain regions. Or for any steps taken to counter these effects. To properly do so requires a full scale modelling of this thing. unfortunately the numbers are changing quite fast, so building these models is quite ifficult i suspect.
You would also have to account for margins of error and the fact that testing is a major influence in any parameter of this model. And testing varies highly between countries.
TLDR: The numbers a re a mess, calculation and modelling is difficult and everything is changing daily. Good luck with coming up with any reliable predictions.
I would love to see numbers for testing so. Especially how many tests have been conducted by region, how many where positive and how many negative. Ideally over time.
Agreed and when we find out that the actual mortality rate is only .1% after 50mil+ people have been infected then will people come back on hacker news and recant? Will they explain to everyone that their reaction was largely based on fear and apologize for attempting to spread that fear to as many people as they possible could?
I gave that some thought lately. Because I simply don't get it why people would do that. Virus or not, I simply don't get that kind of behaviour, I have a long history where this bites my ass scially.
My current theory is that people are just scared. The numbers seem scary (no baseline as things like the flu are not nearly as thoroughly reported by the press) and every new infection and fatality is extensovely covered, whle the bigger picture isn't. Then this whole thing is just one big unknown, and humans are programmed to fear the unknown. Then you have confirmation bias, people tend to seek information confirming their opinions. Social media is designed to reinforce this bias, media is ware of that an needs clicks.This further reinforces this effect.
Also people want confirmation, so they actally seek out these filter bubbles. Humans in general also tend to be bad at risk management and evaluation. So, psychlogically I suspect it is just fear, combined with a desire for confirmation. Because, as crazy it is in my eyes, sharing your fears makes it easier for you to bear. Others not being affraid and giving you pushback on that is the last thing these people want or need.
I have still no idea how tackle that, spreading fear is still just plain wrong. Pushback and facts don't seem to work, so no idea what would.
Even if this turns out to be VERY bad the fear response is nonsensical. If a Grizzly bear is charging you down panicking is not going to help. If you want to see what a measured response to something like this looks like, go speak to a therapist/physiologist and gauge their reaction. Hell, go speak with anyone who has seen real combat and ask them how they feel about the general public's reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak.
So, 8 days later. I think fear is useful if it changes people's behaviour, which appears to be the ONLY THING we have to fight this at the moment. If we can deal with hoarding through social pressure and law as a last resort, we might be okay.
But please compare/contrast the current state of play:
My point entirely! Fun fact, so. Wr traveled to what was declared today by the German Robert Koch Institute as a risk zone in France. Travel 10 days ago, so self quarantine until Sunday.
Death rate for those with comorbidities varies from 13.2-10.5% for cardiovascular disease to 7.6-5.6% for cancer.
People you know are going to die. If your parents are over 60 and otherwise healthy there’s a good chance they’ll die. If they are any way ill it’s even more likely.
Any children that are in utero while their mother is infected are likely to have
> lower educational attainment, increased rates of physical disability, lower income, lower socioeconomic status, and higher transfer payments compared with other birth cohorts
I think it might be because so much is still unknown and Italy's death % keeps going up due to their medical facilities being heavily overloaded.
In Long Island, NY 6 people were recently confirmed infected. All but one is hospitalized but the problem is 2 are in their 20s, 2 are in their 30s, 1 is in their 40s and 1 is in their 80s. The only one not hospitalized is an early 20s woman[0].
The reports don't explicitly say if they had prior health conditions or not but most reporting up until now always included if the patient had prior health conditions.
In any case, this doesn't seem to be limited to the old and sickly. Italian doctors are also saying they are seeing a large influx of younger healthy people needing critical care. This is folks having their lungs punctured and needing mechanical breathing machines to avoid drowning to death from liquid build up in their lungs.
Eventual exposure of something like 60-70% of the world's population is plausible (whereas it certainly never was for polio). That's a _lot_ of deaths.
Look at Italy. The hospitals and ICUs are completely overwhelmed. They're out of ventilators. Healthcare workers are being infected and having to quarantine. Italy has an advanced healthcare system. Italy is the US in 2 or 3 weeks. The US has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy.
Look at Iran or any other country reporting a high rate of infection. Why are they not reporting the same tolls as Italy? Obviously, there is something going on there that other countries aren't having to deal with.
The US only had 15,000 polio cases in 1900. Right now there are only 1,000 known Covid-19 cases in the US but that number is doubling faster than once a week and without people freaking out about it it'll end up infecting more than 50% of the population in a few months.
"Assuming a 22% daily exponential progress in live cases (the current stable
rate in the past week which is way below the 27%-35% range in the past 4 days),
the projected need for extra critical care hospital beds due to the Covid-19 disease (5% of total cases) will outstrip the total ICU beds available in Europe in at the end of March"
