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Comment by cycrutchfield | Hacker News Reader

Which data?

Well the cruise ship showed 55% of folks being asymptomatic and 80% of the remainder have mild flu like symptoms, and with an R0 of 2-3 for every person you do see get tested positive, there’s a mountain of folks spreading it without symptoms.

This also explains why Korea’s [edit: case fatality] rate is so low and so correlated with their high incidence of testing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of us have already had it. There’s a decent shot this all amounts to a big ol nothing burger.

Despite all experts saying it is actually a big problem? It's a disease that spreads rapidly and kills people who wouldn't otherwise have died. That doesn't sound like nothing to me.

It tends to work out better for those who overstate threat than those who understate, both in the moment (you get more attention) and after (if you’re right you get yet more attention, and if you were wrong everyone gives you a pass due to the mass collective panic).

Korea's mortality rate is about 1%, and that is primarily due to a relatively youthful population and the healthcare system not being saturated. I'll also note that 1% is still 10x deadlier than the flu.

It sounds like you may be interested in reading this paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v...

>I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of us have already had it. There’s a decent shot this all amounts to a big ol nothing burger.

Unsupported by any evidence and complete wishful thinking. Please stop with the irresponsible speculation.

You don't know the difference between case fatality rate and mortality rate, so maybe you should stop with the irresponsible speculation.

I was just using the language of the person I was replying to. Would you like to be more pedantic?

True although my typo made my case appear weaker rather than stronger. Either way I’ve patched it.

I apologize, I'm just burnt out from reading comments from the millions of new epidemiologists spreading nonsense. I should probably take a break, but it's fascinating as much as it's antagonizing.

> Korea's mortality rate is about 1%

100% complete bullshit, nobody can know this kind of thing for sure right now.

I am replying to the above person who stated "Korea’s mortality rate is so low". They did not specify a figure, so I used the commonly-cited figure that most people use as an estimate.

Most experts best guess from the country that has done the most testing seems like a far cry from "100% complete bull shit".

RT-PCR tests only show who has it now not who has had it before, we need antibody tests for that. We won’t know if it’s been going around undetected until we get that.

note: They don’t have a mortality rate they have a case fatality rate which always overstates the mortality rate. The two numbers converge over time, CFR down towards MR.

I mistyped in my original post which I have since edited.

It's also due to them actually testing people and having accurate numbers. 1% lines up with the diamond princess numbers

Although the Diamond Princess had 100% testing and I’d wager much older demographic and with more comorbidities (and therefore much more likely to die). If anything that backs up the case Korea’s CFR is again overstated.

Almost certainly it was a much older demographic for Diamond Princess, although I don't have any precise figures. However, I will note that the 1% for the cruise ship is under the conditions of available healthcare resources (i.e. passengers were repatriated back to countries that had available resources able to care for them).

The danger with this disease seems to be that it is highly contagious and countries tend to see a huge spike in cases that completely overwhelms the healthcare system and leads to a several-fold increase in the case fatality rate (e.g. Iran, Italy).

So I agree that on its own COVID-19 is likely less fatal than some of the numbers we tend to see cited, but under outbreak conditions it can be much much more fatal.

While you’re right we also know the disease is 30X+ more fatal to the demographic aboard vs the general population (15%+ for old folks vs 0.2% for the young) even with the best medical care money can buy.

Mathematically this makes no sense. If we all had it already it wouldn’t have an R0 of 2-3. And, if you model the infection rate, even with it being highly exponential, it still takes many many months to spread everywhere because of a) the ~4 day delay from infection of a person to their infectious-ness b) it being a phenomena that must be seeded in each local community and c) applying the prior to the exponential function.

I won’t bother re-creating the epidemiological studies as professionals have much better simulations than I could offer.

I will urge you to read up on the models before assuming this thing is “already everywhere” which also implies it won’t grow exponentially.

> I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of us have already had it.

The death count math and growth rate doesn't check out. If that were true (i.e that the total infection rate was already non-negligible) then the disease must have either been growing for months without detection and without spreading from Hubei, or it must in some crazy way be spreading much faster among the asymptomatic than among the serious cases.

The article argues for a roughly 6x undercount. That's still much lower than saturation, meaning that we have a lot of headroom to grow out of control still.

Stay. At. Home.

> it must in some crazy way be spreading much faster among the asymptomatic than among the serious cases.

Would that be surprising? If you're contagious a few days before any symptoms, you'd have plenty of time to transmit it to several other folks. Even if your case then becomes serious (which is not terribly likely in this model), you're going to be staying home or in treatment, and probably much more careful about contact with others.

I'd bet my own health that you're pretty darn close (but I'm still going to avoid visiting old folks for a while). From the conclusion:

> Presently, there are four, endemic, coronavirus strains currently circulating in human populations (229E, HKU1, NL63, OC43). If the novel coronavirus follows the pattern of 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza, it will also spread globally and become a fifth endemic coronavirus within the human population.

This thing is extremely contagious, it's probably already everywhere, and there's a good chance it will be circulating indefinitely. Hopefully folks will just get tired of the panic after a while. And if we're lucky, this might lead to more awareness about the devastation that respiratory illnesses cause, especially to old folks, every year across the world.

If you want to yell at me because I'm not panicking enough, save your breath. I'm just as pissed at you for spreading a terrible mind-virus, so call it even if you must.

This would be great, but watch some of the videos of Italian Doctors detailing their experiences and see if you still believe it.

South Korea is about 0.9% currently, (deaths/confirmed-cases). If they have a lot of asymptomatic or untested people, that'd drag that rate down. Less than other countries since they test a lot. Their (deaths/(deaths+recoveries) is about 6% - that will drag the rate up as active cases resolve. The former rate went from 0.6% to 0.9% over the same time frame that the latter rate went from 28.5% to 6%. So... yeah, maybe they're around 1%, not counting asymptomatics.

I had this theory a few weeks ago, based on some personal experience and observations of unusual respiratory illnesses in people I know, including one hospitalization. However in recent days it seems unlikely to be valid due to the deteriorating situation in Italy and then Spain. It'd be wonderful if proven true. We will find out in the next 14 days.

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