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Comment by cycrutchfield | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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