There is a lot of good news coming out. The whole exponential growth is not happening.

China is closing all of its makeshift hospitals as the number of active cases is declining fast down to 16K today.

South Korea seems to have hit peak active numbers at about 7K. The number of recoveries will start to rise soon which will reduce the active cases.

Even Italy has turned the exponential growth of active cases into what seems to be logarithmic (slowing) growth. My best guess is that active cases will peak in one or two weeks. Recoveries are going up too with 280 yesterday which indicates that the virus was in Italy for a long time.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

Italy has 2,313 new cases and 196 new deaths today. Damn, still not slowed down. Was hoping it already worked yesterday.

Edit: seems like 600 of those new cases belong to yesterday so yesterday didn't really have a decline. 

yep Italy is at 12462 cases with 10590 of those being active cases.

The cruelty of statistical outliers. From slowing down to 1.04x growth factor yesterday, today's is already at 1.46x. The USA passed the 1,000 cases as well now.

2 new cases in Ontario, first one was a man in his 50's attending a conference in Toronto, the other a doctor in Hamilton.

On Wednesday, CBC learned a staff member in her 30s tested positive for COVID-19 after returning from a personal trip to Hawaii. Since the doctor's return to the Juravinski Cancer Centre, she was in contact with both cancer patients and staff members.

The doctor was at work on the afternoon of March 9 and was tested that same day. She received confirmation of a positive test on March 10 and has been in self-isolation since.

I cycle by that hospital in Summer, it's closing in from both sides now.

It's likely to be between thst 1% and 3.4%.

It is actually not at all that, based on 72000 closed cases, which is a fucking huge sample to have stable statistics. 1 to 3,4% is an utopia which has no serious explanation, just an anti panic number. 6,06% is what reality has shown after 2 months, having 500.000 or 72.000 cases won't change a lot this result, it is actually getting to be worse now that young asian population are almost done with it. We had a bottom value at 5,64% on March 7th, and now it is increasing every days.

You are under the false impression everyone who gets it has been being tested and confirmed as a case. Any epidemiologist would tell you that simply doesn't happen, even for the more severe diseases. With Covid-19 some studies have estimated as many as 90% undetected in China, given transmission rates and dissemination patterns. A lot of people have no symptoms at all, a lot have less than a cold, some cough for just two days and that's it. That sample means as much as the 100,000 confirmed cases of H1N1 in the US in 2009 with 4% of deaths.

.. that's not how statistics work

72k is only "a good sample size" if the sample is unbiased, which yours isn't! It contains the major fallout area Hubei, where the hospital system was overwhelmed and dozens of mild cases were simply sent home and didn't make it into the statistics.

Italy also doesn't really track mild cases anymore..

"Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:

"Things will get worse." How much worse it will get depends on two things, he said: containing the influx of infected people coming from other countries and containing local outbreaks within the U.S.

When pressed by lawmakers for an estimate of eventual fatalities in the U.S., Fauci said it will be “totally dependent upon how we respond to it.”

“I can’t give you a number,” he said. “I can’t give you a realistic number until we put into the factor of how we respond. If we’re complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/top-federal-health-official-says-coronavirus-outbreak-is-going-to-get-worse-in-the-us.html

I hope those in denial will ever understand this. Extreme measurements will reduce deaths by a huge factor and I hope they won't be so stupid to say in a year or so "ohh only a few thousand people have died, I told you that the normal flu is much worse and that everything was so overblown"

But that's exactly what they will tell everyone. Some at my work are also like that. They annoy me so much atm because they will never be able to accept that only the extreme measurements they complain about will be the reason why maybe some few thousand and not hundred thousands or even millions will die in bigger countries. 

Damn, really seems as if many countries just don't test properly. Just look at Quatar from today. Their total cases increased from 24 to 262 today. They only are 2.6 million people.  Don't even want to know about the real situation in Egypt and so on.

And in China, roughly 30'000 elderly people die every day. Likely 99% of those have never been tested. So there really is now way of getting exact numbers.

You can only try statistics with known sample sizes. And so far, roughly 4'000 deaths in 120'000 known cases, so the current death rate is at least 3.3%.