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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

#321

Post by beauzero »

zaroth wrote: post #245
learc83 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said cruise ships skew much older than the general population, so this tells us very little about the actual mortality rate. All 4 people who died were in their 80s.

IMO it’s one of the best data points we have. As I understand it, everyone on the ship was exposed, everyone was tested, we know exactly how many people became infected, and under close to ideal treatment conditions, there have been (so far) 4 fatalities of elderly patients. Yes, this doesn’t tell you what happens with less than ideal care (higher fatality rates), or under different populations (lower fatality rates)…

That seems to be the numbers (0.5%) coming out of S. Korea, which I believe has the best publicly available numbers. See https://corona-live.com so far it seems accurate and the linked supporting articles are from "internet reliable" sources ...not fringe.

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

#322

Post by marcosdumay »

patall wrote: post #289
Tenoke wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead/infected) is that you're assuming that the infected won't die. On the other hand, there are also a lot of infected who only have a mild version and are never checked and recorded, which swings it in the other direction. Edit: Seems like the parent post later edited their post to mention the above.

But that could be said about any disease. As is, it is mortality given that you have symptoms which is a pretty good measure to have. For everything else, you need some many more parameters, better tests etc. Even a test for antibodies in blood which would be the gold standard can fail. Also, we do not know how many people are naturally immune to the disease. May be 10 world wide, maybe 10%, who knows?

> mortality given that you have symptoms which is a pretty good measure to have

It's a very bad metric to estimate the impact of an epidemics. It's way worse than useless for that, it can only lead to baseless panic.

It's a pretty good metric for many uses, just not for this one.

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

#323

Post by marcosdumay »

admax88q wrote: post #170
blattimwind wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With the measurement people are using, yes, you can only know an upper bound.

It's possible to discover an actual estimate, but it takes time and resources. Researchers may care about doing that after the crisis passes, but it's very unlikely anybody will care about this right now.

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

#324

Post by inferiorhuman »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #268
zaroth wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it’s one of the best data points we have. As I understand it, everyone on the ship was exposed, everyone was tested, we know exactly how many people became infected, and under close to ideal treatment conditions, there have been (so far) 4 fatalities of elderly patients. Yes, this doesn’t tell you what happens with less than ideal care (higher fatality rates), or under different populations (lower fatality rates)…

Which makes it more or less identical to flu. There are around 400,000 deaths from flu globally, every year. (The numbers vary by quite a bit.) And that's after vaccination efforts. So far I'm seeing no evidence to persuade me this is significantly deadlier. Everything that has been said about COVID-19 - the stress on healthcare, and so on - has already been happening during flu waves. For decades. The real differenc…

Which makes it more or less identical to flu.

No, it makes it about 5x worse than a typical flu season (10x worse than what America is seeing this year).

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

#325

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

cm2187 wrote: post #301
generalpass wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I agree with the overall sentiment, in the context of a novel pandemic, downplaying the risks is far worse than overplaying them IMO. Probably true, as long as you're not one of the ones rounded up and sent to prison, er, I mean, quarantine.

Or the people who will lose their job because of the economic impact of an unnecessary panic.

Unfortunately, sickness and death also have an economic impact. I have no idea how to balance those two forces.

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

#326

Post by 09bjb »

mns wrote: post #141
nik_s wrote: 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 do have one question and I'm asking this seriously, not to start an argument or to attack someone. I also saw this here in a lot of the posts about covid-19. We have numbers, but every time people tend to ignore them or say we should not trust the numbers, take them with a grain of salt, "I think this is way worse, it's going to get way worse" and so on. It's like there is this thirst for disaster or some global dr…

> It's like there is this thirst for disaster or some global drama everywhere

People like to pretend like the world is causing their internal state, that their mood is an inevitable product of the environment they're in. I feel catastrophic, disastrous, and look at all the evidence that the world is headed for a cliff! True, we're embedded in our world, but a peaceful person doesn't spend as much time focusing on Eschatology.

Life is confirmation bias. Numbers can help, I suppose.

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

#327

Post by learc83 »

obelos wrote: post #302
sampo wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How fast or slow does the virus evolve towards lower mortality? If you get infected months later, is it still essentially the same virus, or a less aggressive strain?

Given the 2-3 week transmissible incubation period where the infected show no symptoms, it doesn't seem like there's short enough feedback loop for the lethality to be tempered through natural selection within the initial period of the outbreak (which we're just beginning).

>Given the 2-3 week transmissible incubation period

No one knows if it's transmissible during the entire incubation period. It's almost certainly not given how other viruses behave. Also the possibility of transmission during asymptomatic periods doesn't mean that it's likely, or that most transmissions happen during that time.

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

#328

Post by learc83 »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #324
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes it more or less identical to flu. There are around 400,000 deaths from flu globally, every year. (The numbers vary by quite a bit.) And that's after vaccination efforts. So far I'm seeing no evidence to persuade me this is significantly deadlier. Everything that has been said about COVID-19 - the stress on healthcare, and so on - has already been happening during flu waves. For decades. The real differenc…

Which makes it more or less identical to flu. No, it makes it about 5x worse than a typical flu season (10x worse than what America is seeing this year).

5x worse than a typical flu season. We have atypical flu seasons all the time.

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

#329

Post by [deleted] »

nik_s wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#330

Post by learc83 »

patall wrote: post #289
Tenoke wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead/infected) is that you're assuming that the infected won't die. On the other hand, there are also a lot of infected who only have a mild version and are never checked and recorded, which swings it in the other direction. Edit: Seems like the parent post later edited their post to mention the above.

But that could be said about any disease. As is, it is mortality given that you have symptoms which is a pretty good measure to have. For everything else, you need some many more parameters, better tests etc. Even a test for antibodies in blood which would be the gold standard can fail. Also, we do not know how many people are naturally immune to the disease. May be 10 world wide, maybe 10%, who knows?

>But that could be said about any disease.

With diseases that have been better studied, we have large population studies to determine how many people have been infected for every 1 person reported.

>As is, it is mortality given that you have symptoms which is a pretty good measure to have

We don't know that because we have no idea how many people have mild to moderate symptoms and haven't been tested.

At best it's mortality given that you are severe enough to seek treatment.

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