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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

That number will vary greatly by region and the quality of healthcare, as well as the functioning ability of governments to handle it. The infection rate is such that it’s exponentially growing, which means it’s showing no signs of slowing down. If 1% of the world dies from it, that’s hundreds of millions of people dying from something in addition to everything else already killing people. This is really bad.

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The death rate seems so low, that I could imagine many of the elderly people dieing from it, would also have been killed from many other viruses that would have possibly come along shortly after.

It's both. When a virus like this taxes your immune system, the risk of secondary infections becomes far greater.

> If 1% of the world dies from it, that’s hundreds of millions of people dying from something in addition to everything else already killing people.

You seem to have a very unconventional estimate of the world population. 1% of 8 billion is not hundreds of millions.

Anyway, overall current (non-COVID) mortality rate is around 1% annually as well, mostly elderly people as well, so even if in an extremely unlikely and tragic case this will kill 1% of the world population, expect twice as many people you know to die compared to a regular year.

Err yes ok late night arithmetic was off. But still many millions of people.

Having twice the normal population die in a given year is an extreme event. The way you’re describing it sounds like it’s no biggie.

> The infection rate is such that it’s exponentially growing

Globally speaking, that's not the case. The number of new cases was highest in early to mid-February and has been lower in the past two weeks.

> The number of new cases was highest in early to mid-February and has been lower in the past two weeks.

What? That doesn't matter at all.

The number of new cases globally is growing at an increasing rate- the number will eclipse that from early-mid february shortly.

> The number of new cases globally is growing at an increasing rate

That's just not true. The daily increase in total cases globally has been going down since mid February.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594... (Link fixed, thanks)

I can't see anything at your link - first it asks for a login, then I login with Google and get an error. Here [1] it looks like for a while around mid february the daily increase was getting less, but it's picking up again.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

But that's most likely limited by testing resources. Many of the countries that haven't reported cases are developing nations that don't have the resources to do thousands of daily tests. Similarly, countries like the US have been lagging in their testing. Similarly, France has stopped doing tests except for people who are critically-ill.

So, it would stand to reason that you would see a decrease in the number of confirmed cases if there's an artificial limit in the number of cases reported.

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