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Comment by imustbeevil | Hacker News Reader

> "If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu," Erickson said. "And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545"

For comparison, 1 million Americans (50x less) have had covid, and so far 59,225 have died (1.4x more) [0]. Their conclusion is that this is no worse than the flu, even though those numbers show it being more than 60x more deadly.

edit: Bringing this up from lower discussion: Even if you assume 10x more cases than reported, with 2x observed excess deaths [1], that's 10 million people sick and 100,000 dead; 5x less people sick and 2.5x more people dead than the flu.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...

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Confirmed cases are not the total number of cases.

Yeah sorry I only have access to data that exists, as mentioned in the original comment.

Weird how no one who brings up under-reported cases has any opinion about under-reported deaths, since the insinuation you're making is that there are statistically more unreported cases than deaths. That seems like a claim you may want to justify.

the insinuation you're making is that there are statistically more unreported cases than deaths. That seems like a claim you may want to justify.

Find any serious expert who does not believe that. Estimates have always been that cases are underreported by 10-20x, and that's consistent with recent serology tests.

From this source [0] it looks like excess deaths are at least 2x higher than those attributed to coronavirus. If you assume deaths would decrease with less people driving / going in public, that could be even more.

Cases are obviously under-reported. I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported.

Even if there were 10x as many cases, that would be 10 million people and 100,000 deaths (based on the above 2x excess number). That's 5x less people sick and 2.5x more people dead than the flu.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...

From this source it looks like excess deaths are at least 2x higher than those attributed to coronavirus.

Sure, that's plausible.

I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported.

That's not plausible. The current case fatality rate (known deaths divided by known cases) is 5.7% according to https://infection2020.com/#. Nobody seriously believes that 5% of infected people end up dying; the most pessimistic estimates are between 1 and 2 percent. (Which would of course still be extremely bad).

> If you assume deaths would decrease with less people driving / going in public, that could be even more.

You can't make that assumption because of things like suicides and people delaying treatment for serious acute health issues.

To your point, cbc reported this week that some ~25 people are suspected of dying due to postponed heart surgeries. Not a lot of people, but still sad.

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