Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[vivster]

shikamaru317 said:

https://reason.com/2020/04/20/l-a-county-antibody-tests-suggest-the-fatality-rate-for-covid-19-is-much-lower-than-people-feared/?amp&__twitter_impression=true

Antibody tests suggest that the actual number of cases is 40x higher than the number of confirmed cases. The vast majority get a mild version with no or mild symptoms and never get tested as a result. With the number of cases 40x higher than we thought, it brings the fatality rate down to between 0.1 and 0.2%, barely higher than the seasonal flu fatality rate of 0.1%.

I wouldn't read much into these studies. Many have been made and the results range from 5x to 100x which is too huge of a range to base any decisions on it. Infection rates vary greatly between countries and even within them. Also unless you take tens of thousands of completely random samples across the country your results will always be biased. I think the only unbiased test I've seen so far is the one from Italy where they tested a whole village, which also isn't representative of any wider demographic. And then there is the fact these tests are only snapshots in time. Tested people could develop symptoms within an hour of that test and previously negative cases could become positive. That's not even mentioning the high possibility of false positives or false negatives.

I'm pretty sure that world wide we'll stay comfortably below a mortality rate of 1% but it's just way too early to determine that. I wish that instead of these numerous tiny studies, they'd focus their effort completely on nothing less than mass testing. Which means testing millions of people no matter if there is suspicion of infection or not.