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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Yes. The consensus I've seen forming is that at least 15% of NYC has had it by now - a variety of questionably random samples have suggested numbers near that.

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NY has 17x more deaths than California. That would mean if 3% of CA was infected (yes this is LA only but for ease of comparison) it would be 51%+ of NY was infected. Far more than just 15%.

LA is one of the densest parts of CA though, outside of SF/Bay Area. So if LA is 3%, you could assume the state as a whole is maybe 1-2%. Then 17x that becomes 17-34%, which seems more reasonable.

The comparison is overweighting LA county, which has 25% of California's population but 60% of its deaths. (I don't know what the math ends up being off the top of my head.)

CFR is not a great way of comparing across regions, it could be due to any number of factors. Demographics (i.e. age), co-moribidities and the amount of hospital space available.

In fact the per-country spread of CFR is huge, from a low of 0.07% in Singapore to a high of 14.93% in Belgium, a whole 3 orders of magnitude. The H1N1 influenza CFR at a similar point in the outbreak was between 0.1% and 5.1% -- but the final IFR ended up at 0.02% [1].

[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...

Consensus among whom?

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009316

15.6% of pregnant woman at a given hospital were PCR confirmed over 2 weeks. I haven't seen strong arguments this wouldn't be broadly characteristic of the overall population. Worse (or better depending on how you look at it), there's significant false negatives with PCR testing.

It's credible NYC could be at 30% by April 4 and given that confirmed cases doubled since then, could be at 50%+ by now.

You can't extrapolate from pregnant women who have been visiting medical facilities to the general population.

How off do you think this can be? Women go once a week to a medical facility (and that's to an ob-gen, not the emergency room) before birth, but also don't go out in general. You could just as well make the case this is lower than the general population.

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