Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirekrusin | Hacker News Reader

I'm not professional and my napkin/google calculation shows something closer to 327.2 million * 0.7 * 0.01 = two million two hundred ninety thousand four hundred deaths - is it stupid?

View on HN

Fauci is not sharing the data he used but 0.01 is probably not the fatality rate he plugged in. That number ignores the many undiagnosed cases. Here are some estimates using alternative methods that don't rely on widespread testing:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...

In the same boat here, my estimate is around ~250.000, which is 3x as bad as the 2017-18 flu season in the US. But i guess none of us have any real idea at this point.

Some mitigation does seem possible if this report can be trusted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22721574

No, not stupid. It's one scenario, but the time span is absent: do we reach 0.7 in three years or three months? At the current rate probably the latter, which might increase the 0.01 as well, because of a certain overwhelming of the health care system in the US (e.g. a young boy in California has not been treated because he could not pay, so he died).

"can't pay" is not overwhelming the system, that's overwhelming greed.

If you're talking about the case I think you're talking about,

""" However, Los Angeles’ County Department of Public Health later said the teen’s death was taken off a list of deaths associated with Covid-19 in the area. The department said the CDC would complete an investigation into the teen’s death. It remained unclear what symptoms he may have been experiencing prior to his death. """

The 17yo fatality that Gavin Newsom mentioned in a news report was also later reclassified as not CV related.

The late 21yo patient in the UK was never tested for CV.

The media do not have a great track record here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com