Hacker News Reader

Great to see actual testing on a representative population sample, though I’m not sure what the consequences ought to be:

> These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases.

View on HN

So with 69 deaths so far and 9 deaths last week in Santa Clara County, projecting that to an extra 4 weeks to 105 deaths for those infected in early April, that means a 0.16% death rate?

Lots of reasons I don't think you can extrapolate meaningful death rates from this yet. One big one is that time from infection to death covers a very wide range: in Wuhan time from hospitalization to death had both a mean and a standard deviation of about 2 weeks, and time from infection to hospitalization isn't well known yet, but is likely at least a week. Add to that the fact that some cases are diagnosed post-mortem and you might not know about all of the fatalities for early April cases until well into May.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com