The_jackalope
The_jackalope's Journal2% mortality from coronavirus? I don't think so.
A lot of us have been arriving at a mortality rate for Coronavirus by dividing deaths by infections. For instance, the current numbers are: 1,112 deaths / 44,789 cases for a "mortality rate" around 2.5%.
I was just looking at the coronavirus tracking page https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/ and something clicked. The number we should be looking at is the number of resolved cases that died and the number of resolved cases that recovered. The disease has now been active long enough to allow us to build up a statistically representative sample of resolutions, both recoveries and deaths.
I realized as I looked at the numbers on that page that every case will eventually move from the "active" to the "resolved" category. At that point, ceteris paribus of course, the ratio of deaths to recoveries will be about the same as it is now, but applied to the full population of infections. And that number is not a comforting 2%
In fact, out of a total infected population of 44,789, 5,641 cases have now resolved. Of those, 1,112 have died and 4,529 have recovered. The other 39,148 cases have not yet resolved - they are still sick.
It looks to me as though by the time the illness burns itself out, the death rate will look more like 20% than 2%. That puts it firmly in the category of the 1918 Spanish flu.
It's no wonder the epidemiologists are freaking out.
Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?
This is my story about falling into - and then climbing out of - a dark night of the soul, in the company of a collapsing civilization. In the end, our stories are about how we respond, and the personal contributions we bring, to a world in crisis.
The Wuhan coronavirus (the Wuhan Flu sounds catchy) infection curve
From 278 infections on January 20 to 7700 yesterday (as reported by Johns Hopkins at https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6), the infection rate increase has been virtually constant at 45% per day.
The correlation of the calculated curve with the actual observations using either the CORREL or PEARSON function in Excel is 0.9933
If nothing interrupts the contagion (i.e the curve holds its 45%/day increase) there would be about one million infections by February 11 - less than two weeks from now.
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Member since: Sun Jun 4, 2017, 05:46 PMNumber of posts: 1,660
