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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

The craziest stat I heard today was on my local news, and it was about COVID19 in the county, Davidson County (Nashville, TN,) they said of all the active cases in the county only 2 had been hospitalized. That's out of 163. The others were sent home to be quarantined and medicated. I was floored. Why are stats like that not shared? That seems like very valuable information. Hospitalization rates should be one of the main stats being shared, imo.

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hospitalization rates are being shared. IIRC, they are generally around 20% of confirmed cases, but the testing rate is low here so hard to know the true numbers

The testing rate is low almost everywhere. The mass testing done in the Italian town Vò suggests that 50-75% of infections are asymptomatic (but still contagious). This matches the findings from the cruise ship "Diamond Princess".

Also note that the populations of both the cruise ship and Vò skew quite a bit older than the world average, and younger people are more likely to be asymptomatic (AFAIK we still don't know how more likely)

Sure but most of those are new cases. Do you have any idea what happened with those cases two weeks later or even if it's been two or three weeks for the cases? You'd only expect that 16-32 would require hospitalization in any case. But on the other hand, you can expect 326 visible or invisible cases the next week and gradually things get difficult, if the trend that's been documented continues.

I can see that, but I also can see that this could give us insight into the virus as it spreads throughout the population. Like, what if it is mutating, becoming weaker/stronger, hospitalization rates would give us insight into that.

Hospitalization rate is a function of age; if the 163 infected are young, you would expect a hospitalization rate of near zero.

That doesn't seem abnormal? The majority of cases don't need hospitalisation. Some countries have hospitalised most cases while numbers are small, but mostly as a precaution, and they'll be kicked out once numbers rise. I thought that was fairly well known.

> Why are stats like that not shared? That seems like very valuable information. Hospitalization rates should be one of the main stats being shared, imo.

Because it’s in the neighborhood of 15% worst case needing hospitalization. You’ve already got enough people blowing off quarantine measures, so no one is terribly eager to share that of the people who DO get the virus, 85% don’t require hospitalization. I get the reasoning from a public policy perspective, but I agree that information should be made a bit more easily accessible.

> Why are stats like that not shared? That seems like very valuable information.

Because it's only 163, and data of an unknown quality.

In Iowa the Department of Health is reporting over 2100 negative tests (we are currently only testing patients who come into the hospital or already admitted) and 105 confirmed cases. Obviously a much smaller population size than other areas.

So far. How many of those will need hospital care in the next few weeks?

> Why are stats like that not shared?

They are being shared daily.

It doesn't seem like hospitalization rates are being as consistently tracked. Or if they are, not disseminated. My state's official page tracks changes daily, but doesn't include hospitalizations.

There are countries that do report:

"17 March: the total number of cases was 1705, of which 314 patients had been admitted to the hospital"

That was week ago, now it's 1230 people in the hospital, or 4 times more. So I expect 5000 at the end of the next week in the Netherlands. The growth of the infection by the novel virus is exponential, until strong enough measures start to work, and the Netherlands wasn't (due to the politicians) ready to seriously enforce them.

So it's around 20%, once one has more than a few cases. And that's far from being a small percentage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_t...

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