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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

No, the worst case scenario is much worse than that. Hospitals won't have room to take care of most people with the virus or other illnesses for that matter, and many will die as a result of just that. The hospitalization rate is quite a bit more than 1%, and that becomes the death rate when no hospital can take care of you. These have all been repeated in the media many, many times by now. I'm in fascination of how people are receiving the memo so slowly in 2020.

Not to mention 1/100 is enough for a lot of people to result in at least one person they know dying.

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>No, the worst case scenario is much worse than that

It's really not. People just don't seem to grasp that the rates for positive cases are drastically different than the rates for people infected. We aren't doing nearly enough testing to catch even all the symptomatic cases let alone the asymptomatic and mild ones.

The infection fatality rate is almost certainly under 1% and not everyone will get infected even in the worst case.

>Not to mention 1/100 is enough for a lot of people to result in at least one person they know dying.

Only if we use a very broad definition of what "know" means.

Look at parts of Italy--there are areas that have already had 1% of the population die. Note that most of these are not being reported as Covid-19 deaths (presumably because of the overload, they never got tested), we simply see it in excess mortality.

>Look at parts of Italy--there are areas that have already had 1% of the population die

Which parts are that?

Nembro, Italy. Pop. 11000, 152 deaths. 1.38% of the population died. In March.

Isn't that the part of Italy where hospital collapse actually happened? And in the same article they conjecture they are now at ~herd immunity. And the demographics are skewed towards the elderly so again they themselves estimated the death rate being consistent with 1%, age-adjusted. And they counted ALL the surplus dead. This is an upper bound of the absolute worst case, as far as I can tell.

Nobody there is going to die in April from covid?

They are past the peak (again based on the info from the original article), so it doesn't seem likely the numbers will change a lot; not to the level of 6%/3%/other numbers being suggested in other sources.

A small town doesn't really count as a "part" of a country.

It's also probably just a statistical outlier. Even if the overall IFR is 0.5% you will see some areas with rates higher or lower than that from chance or their demographics.

It's still early on in the pandemic. The vast majority of the people who will die from it still haven't yet. It's way too early to be putting ceilings on the overall death rate.

I believe there are more examples, but that is one of them.

You appear to be taking about the mortality rate when medical care is available. What is the rate after the hospitals are full?

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