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Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

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Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#161
post #57

The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead/(infected + dead)) is that you're assuming that the infected won't die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead / (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of…

According to Johns Hopkins data Feb 27, 2020 [0], Iran would come to: Deaths: 26 Recovered: 49 (26 / (26 + 49)) = 34.7% [0] https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

We can conclude that Iran is severely underreporting cases.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, though that's mostly rolled up in the gender statistics. Men are far more likely smokers than women in China. Mentioned in TFA.

Is the F in 'TFA' what I think it is?

Fine is fine.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#163
post #87

So it’s just a coincidence that Dr. Li Wenliang, who was 34, died and he only had a 0.2% chance of dying? I find this too much of a coincidence. There is no way these numbers can be correct.

There's reporting bias. Would you have heard of him if he had survived?

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#164
post #57

The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead/(infected + dead)) is that you're assuming that the infected won't die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead / (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of…

Your formula has the opposite problem, by looking at cases that have a known outcome you are biasing results towards cases that end quickly (in particular cases that end in death). For a proper estimate we should look at cases where the infection is known to have begun e.g. a month ago. Then the mortality rate should be somewhere between dead/infected and dead/(dead + recovered).

> Your formula has the opposite problem, by looking at cases that have a known outcome you are biasing results towards cases that end quickly (in particular case that end in death).

Unless I'm mistaken, that would only be true if cases that end in death are much faster than the cases that end in recovery. I have found it difficult to find detailed statistics on the topic, so I cannot tell you that it's definitely true or not, but I agree that it's an important variable that should be taken into the equation.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#165

what css artifact is causing the last "e" in "Rate" to be consistently out of the bold formatting?

Not CSS's fault, it's just how the document is marked-up:

    

*Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) ...

The fact that it happens consistently is probably a result of copy-and-paste (or equivalently, it's wrong in a report-generating template of some kind that produced each section).

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#166

Imagine if people would get as excited about actual problems like global warming and the unfolding mass extinction as they do about a new mild flu.

Timescale, and immediacy of the threat. Humans are not good at long timescale thinking.

BTW I don't think these things need to be mutually exclusive. We should take action against all kinds of threats

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#167

This is the email I sent my team last night. We should consider working from home. You may all have seen the news by now. A patient was just diagnosed with COVID-19 at UC Davis after having no known contact with anyone travelling. Importantly, they were diagnosed after being intubated already for 7 days. It is suspected that this is the first known case of public transmission of the virus in the US. From what we know…

Seems like a pretty strong overreaction. The flu leads to about half a million hospitalizations in the US each year, while COVID-19 has lead to dozens. So your team is thousands of times more likely to transmit the flu then COVID-19 - even if COVID-19 is 50x more dangerous, it is far more likely that your team will cause hospitalizations due to the flu. I don't see why anyone should be taking precautions for COVID-19…

The reason for the reaction is described in my post. We now have community transmission 50 miles away from my office that was undetected for at least 2 weeks. At the moment, nobody knows how many cases there are.

The flu is less virulent, less deadly, and most people get flu shots which creates herd immunity.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#168
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An early preprint from the team of China’s leading expert Zhong Nanshan tagged smokers and non-smokers among the 1099 cases they analyzed. 85.4% supposedly never smoked, with 14.5% of those cases severe. So it’s not like non-smokers are very much immune. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.06.20020974v... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.06.20020974v...

I would say that it really dismisses smoking as a big factor then.

The percentage of severe cases among smokers is definitely higher, although the sample size is small.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s something off about Iran. Iran is a theocratic authoritarian regime under extreme international sanctions. Might have something to do with that. Iran also only has 0.2 hospital beds per 1k people.

A bit off topic but Iran is mostly only under American and Israeli sanctions at this point after Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. The rest of the world can trade with Iran though many companies are still unwilling due to the American pressure.

Due to how interconnected European and American finance and business is this effectively means that Europe cannot trade to Iran.

The Europeans cannot enforce the JCPOA without either some kind of American cooperation or a major decoupling their financial systems from the US. I believe Macron has made public musing about the latter as an option, but then again Macron says a lot of things that lack pan-european support.

Re: Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

#170
post #57

The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead/(infected + dead)) is that you're assuming that the infected won't die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead / (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of…

I don't think a sensible mortality rate can be computed at this point, because we have no idea, not even good estimates, how many people contracted the pathogen. 10 dead out of 1000? Or 10000? Or 20000? In Wuhan they apparently checked ~almost everyone for symptoms - temperature - but showing symptoms != infected. So far it seems that there is an exceptionally large proportion of infected people showing no or barely…

doesn't that mean that we can only compute an upper bound on the mortality rate?

We will never know for certain how many cases there are, but _of the cases we know about_ we can compute a reasonable upper bound on mortality. Were more likely not to learn of cases than were not fatal than we are of cases which are fatal as severe cases are more likely to seek treatment.

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