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chickenpotpie

Assuming this is true and mortality rate of 2%, that means 510,000 Californians will die.

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Average mortality according to recent analysis is 0.125%

https://www.cebm.net/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/

Which is in consistent with the data from a cruise ship where all people could be tested.

Which means 30k deaths not 500k. Still a lot I think.

Also pretty close to flu, which makes me distrustful of this mortality rate, seeing how different it looks in Italy now compared to seasonal flu.

Italy is older, yes, but still hovering around an 8.2% death rate, far above China's 4%

Italy has been seeing overflowing hospitals in recent previous years as well during peak influenza season. So that doesn't by itself imply something truly unusual.

I wish I could find the source for this (it was a medical paper) but I've read a lot of web pages lately and not bookmarked them all systematically.

Yesterday I pointed out that dramatic news of war-like conditions in hospitals, running out of beds, erecting tents to hold extra patients and warnings of imminent collapse have happened in the recent past in ... California:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632440

If you look you can instantly find news stories that sound exactly like those coming out of Italy at the moment, but from recent years in flu season, for almost any country.

It's fair to say that hospitals running out of beds or putting people in corridors, tents, hastily converted rooms isn't unusual. Perhaps we should ask why there isn't enough peak capacity in western health systems to handle just a bad flu season, let alone something like this.

Once ICUs are full, mortality will be much higher than 2%.

Yes, this is hot-nonsense. They will shut the state down entirely the day 20,000 people die on the streets surrounding a hospital.

It will be too late by then. After 20,000 people have died on the streets more than 56% of California will be infected with COVID-19.

Why would you post something like this? We know that the fatality rates are incredibly uncertain, at best, ranging from below a percent in some countries, to over five percent in others.

So you're engaging in pure speculation. Why do it, other than to create panic?

Why try to predict anything? In a pandemic you need to prepare for the worst case scenario as soon as possible. If we do nothing many people will die and Americans need to know that is a possibility.

Nobody is preparing anything based on the predictions of HN comments.

To calibrate a rational response by governments, organizations and individuals. Without widely-disseminated good data, people could either be acting like it's Spring Break on Florida's beaches or hiding in their underground Cloverfield bunker. A rational response lies somewhere in the middle, depending on what the actual conditions are.

Hiding data, reality and/or lying to people leaves us all less prepared to take proactive steps to protect ourselves without over-spending or being caught under-prepared.

If some people panic because they can't handle reality, that's their own fault.

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