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crissindahouse on 25 March 2020
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Teeqoz said:
JRPGfan said:

That is not a worst case.

Worse case (70% infection rate) the health care system collapses.
By then its not 2,5% mortality rate, but something likely well over 10%.

You likely wont even have people to give beds/care, or air to the sick.
Not to mention enough ventilators, in such a situation.

In italy its around ~9,8% currently (confirmed vs mortalities):
Believe it or not, there health care system still funktions pretty well.

At a 70% infection rate, any system would totally collapse..... at that point hospitals would be like? whats the point.
Just stay home and die there, we cant help.


Upto ~20% require medical attention aided air (not ventilators) but a sick bed to lay down in, and 100% oxygen to help them get air through their lunges.

Thats why I dont think Mortality rates will go over 20%.
However you *could* see something like 10-15% mortality rates, if things get really nasty and health care collapses completely.



Your worse case should be:

70% infected + ~15% mortality rate =  ~34,4 million people dieing in the US.

Thats the absolutely worst, this virus can do.
Hopefully that doesnt happend but.... it gives you perspective.

My country, Norway, has tested roughly 1.5% of the population, which is probably one of the highest test coverages of any country (more than twice as many per capita as South Korea for instance). We have 3k confirmed cases, which should be a decent enough sample size to draw some conclusions. 

So far, we have 14 dead, which is a less than 0.5% CFR. We have 237 hospital admissions, which is a less than 8% hospitalisation rate. 2.5% of the cases have required intensive care (some of which have sadly perished).

While these numbers might increase a bit (notwithstanding a huge amount of undiagnosed cases, though that would bring the numbers further down), as some cases will progress and get worse, and certainly if our health system gets over capacity, it's easy to see that your estimates are absolutely ludicrous and not based on good data. Data sets from other countries that have done extensive testing tell the same story. Italy's CFR and hospitalization rate are so high because they haven't tested enough people.

This doesn't mean this isn't a serious illness. But you still shouldn't make up numbers, or make wild guesses without having done proper research.

You could also just use numbers from single regions of countries like Italy because you can't just say Norway is a better representation as Italy because of a higher percentage of testing when different regions test differently.

Italy tested over 80k people in the Lombardy which has 10m people. Of those 80k tested, you have around 4,5k deaths and like 33k positive cases.

Lombardy has around the same amount of tests and you have like a 30x higher death rate as Norway has.

Italy might be a very negative scenario but Norway is at least right now a very positive one. But the death rate will increase there as well like it also did everywhere else. That's sadly the truth like we also see in countries like Germany now (which does still look good compared to many others)