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Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

The editor of Talkingpoints Memo made a really good point early this week [1]. Just a bit more than 0.1% of NY residents have died from known covid-19 infections. This sets a lower floor of the actual mortality rate, since even if not a single other person died of it in the future, and not a single person died from it but wasn't counted, and even if 100% of NY residents are/were carriers, the mortality rate would be 0.1%.

But an early test shows about 21% infection rate in NYC (tested by serum levels of antigens), and certainly people will continue to die of it, and certainly there are many people who died of it but aren't recognized. Conservatively, the actual mortality rate is at least 0.6%, a multiple greater than the Stanford study.

[1] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/have-fatality-numbers-f...

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0.1% isn't there lower floor if they are over counting deaths from Corona. Here is an example of one such case https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/26/boys-death-no-longer-...

I'm sure there are some misdiagnoses, but enough to skew the results in any significant way? I'd bet $1000 to $1 that the number of unreported cases caused by covid-19 exceeds the number of misattributions that were caused by something else.

I'd bet along side you. There's likely to be 10X more unreported than misattributed cases.

Not to mention misattributions in the other direction - e.g California's discovery of earlier cases, and subsequent backdating or earliest known case.

The attacks on counting likely/suspected cases reek of motivated reasoning

Infection cases or death cases? I would assume that more people get the virus than are reported because some people are asymptomatic, there might not be enough tests and some people might opt not to get tested and go to the hospital. With regard to the number of deaths, I would be surprised if that was under reported since it is very hard to ignore a death. If someone was in critical condition due to breathing issues, I would assume that they would be hospitalized and tested. In addition, if someone was in the hospital and died from something not Corona related, it seems likely that if they happened to have Corona they would be listed as a corona death due to CDC recommendations https://www.scribd.com/document/455607875/US-HHS-Document-to... .

So seeing as total cases are likely underestimated and total deaths are likely overestimated, the 1% hardly seems to me to be the lower floor.

No only that, there’s plenty of evidence showing virus + mechanical ventilators leading to deaths that virus + simpler interventions otherwise wouldn’t. How many deaths were actually unnecessary and preventable[1][2]? I suppose under ordinary circumstances, these deaths could be considered medical malpractice?

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-22/almost-9-...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...

Those would not be medical malpractice. Even if in retrospect it wasn't the best treatment option, at the time the aid was given, it was considered the best medical practice.

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