Well, that is the part I'm puzzled about that ship. It was reported that all passengers were confined to their cabins, all the time. Afaik, ventilation wasn't shut down, for obvious reasons. Now we have a virus whose spreding mechanisms aren't really understood, and you shower over 3000 people with forced air circulation. Was the whole thing really a good idea? (Some countries have begun to fly out their countrypeople off the boat, so my guess is someone higher up in the foodchain also thinks that initial idea wasn't a too bright one.

I didn't add that btw, that was quoted from my original reply to your

"What's to deal with? You most likely won't catch it, but even if you do, you have roughly a 98% chance of being ok and a 2% chance of dying. I don't understand why such low odds produce such a high media frenzy?"

The media frenzy for potential terrorists attacks is far worse while the chance of falling victim to one of those are extremely small. And look at the counter measures we have to live with for such a rare event! However a disease that could truly go viral, with a 1 in 5 chance of catching it, and then a 1 in 5 chance of needing hospitalization when you catch it, 1 in 25 people needing serious care, yeah that's serious.

As for the death rate, it's still uncertain. It's currently 3.1% of total discovered and confirmed cases (active cases plus closed cases) thus the lowest estimate. It's 9.5% of closed cases, the highest estimate. And that's before hospitals get overrun with cases...

So let's say the worst of the worst happens, 1 in 25 people end up needing serious care, roughly 300 million people needing to be hospitalized. When that happens the death rate will go up regardless since hospitals are already at their limits most of the year. So yep, I do think a scenario is possible where that many people can potentially die. Unless the government is hiding lots of spare hospitals and doctors somewhere.


I see the death rate for SARS was actually close to 10%, however it was contained to 8,098 cases. This virus is already close to 10 times that figure plus how many unknown cases might be there in China and other parts.


Exponential growth is a scary thing and it won't happen over night with an incubation period of 2 to 14 days while it seems the contagious stage is when the disease manifests itself. So we still have time to contain it. Early detection and quarantine should work.

Do you even have vacxin for corona? 

@CrazyGamer2017. We'll, you finally did it little buddy. You got that perma-ban you always wanted. I hope you're able to realize your dream of blowing up the universe. Anyway, if you see this, feel free to drop me a line on PSN or youtube.

as the big majority of covid-19 cases are mild it's reasonable to assume that most missed cases also result in a recovery, sth the recoveries vs deaths statistic doesn't address at all

btw while it's true the infection takes a while to kill someone (It seems ~week 3 is the point where a plurality of the deaths happen), recoveries take even longer - which by your own reasoning makes it a flaw in recoveries vs deaths

During the SARS outbreak, there were a significant number of people who were never counted as "recovered" afterwards. I would imagine this number would be far higher for N-Covid considering a lot of milder cases are sent back home to self-quarantine and aren't likely to get tested again unless they need to go back to the hospitals for whatever reason.

Back then in China, total number of cases stopped significantly climbing about 60 days after the beginning of the outbreak; deaths, about two weeks later or 74 days (not shown in graph but that was in the source); but recoveries took another whole month, 104 days, to be properly accounted for. As a consequence of this lag, the death rate continued to climb between day 60 and day 74 before dropping down again as the very late cases continued to recover.

Edit - also significant is looking at the Diamond Princess ship as a controlled environment for the virus without risks of underreporting etc. Mild + assymptomatic cases account for about 95% of all the confirmed infected there (considering 36 severe cases out of ~ 700). Of course, 50% of assymptomatics might be reassuring but is also worrying because of the implications for containment.

The Diamond princess is a bit of a puzzle compared to active cases. If you carry the 36 severe out of 691 back over to the total statistics, then there are over 170K undetected infected walking around. Maybe the Diamond princess is lagging behind or something else is going on.

you have to account for the fact that cruise ship travelers tend to be older and older ppl are much more likely to suffer a severe form of covid-19

There are definitely a lot of undetected cases going about. Since these are virtually indistinguishable from a cold or flu, I don't think we'll never get more than estimates.This isn't a rare phenomenon, since most diseases actually behave this way and their numbers fly under the radar.

However, people with little to no symptoms should have much lower viral loads than the severe cases, so they're also less contagious. Or should be, extrapolating data from similar illnesses.

Edit - other possibilities are that viral tests are actually giving false positives from other, more mild Coronaviruses or, conversely, that the virus itself might be present but it's actually opportunistic Influenza or Streptococcus that's killing all these people. Infectology is complicated...

a similar move was made during the SARS outbreak and the ban was lifted shortly after it died down..