Fighting Coronavirus Isn't Just for the Domestics

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/detroit-auto-show/2020/03/28/coronavirus-detroit-auto-show-canceled-tcf-center-hospital/2934331001/ once again, p!ss off.

@JimZ The data from South Korea, where tracking the coronavirus has been by far the best to date, indicate that as much as 99 percent of active cases in the general population are “mild” and do not require specific medical treatment. The small percentage of cases that do require such services are highly concentrated among those age 60 and older, and further so the older people are. Other things being equal, those over age 70 appear at three times the mortality risk as those age 60 to 69, and those over age 80 at nearly twice the mortality risk of those age 70 to 79. These conclusions are corroborated by the data from Wuhan, China, which show a higher death rate, but an almost identical distribution. The higher death rate in China may be real, but is perhaps a result of less widespread testing. South Korea promptly, and uniquely, started testing the apparently healthy population at large, finding the mild and asymptomatic cases of Covid-19 other countries are overlooking. The experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which houses a contained, older population, proves the point. The death rate among that insular and uniformly exposed population is roughly 1 percent. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing.html

@thelaine Canadian data is that 6% of those confirmed as infected require hospital care, and that 3% require prolonged hospital care. Since hospitals in Canada and the USA regularly operate at just over 95% capacity, the increased load if infections continue unchecked will indeed overwhelm our healthcare systems. In Ontario since the 'shut down' has been implemented the number of people visiting emergency departments for other issues, the number of motor vehicle accidents and instances of violent crime have all decreased signficantly. This alone has helped to free up space at hospitals.

@Arthur Dailey Stats just revised on the 11:00pm news. 7% requiring hospitalization. 3% requiring critical care. Just over 40% of those being hospitalized are under the age of 45.

@Arthur Dailey That's interesting. Compared to NYC your overall hospitalization rate is much lower at 7% vs 20% but your under-45 hospitalization percentage is much higher 40%+ vs 21%. twitter.com/ArmstrongDrew/status/1243362419398729728

@thelaine "The experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which houses a contained, older population, proves the point." I don't know if the Diamond Princess is really the case to make the "overreacting" point. 712 infections out of 3711 passengers and crew is 19.2% infection rate. 10 deaths out of 712 is a 1.4% case fatality rate. Extrapolate those numbers out to the entire US population and you get about 870K dead. That isn't 2M, but it is still a lot of coffins.

@thelaine "... indicate that as much as 99 percent of active cases in the general population are “mild” and do not require specific medical treatment." South Korea's excellent outbreak tracking indicates that 1.5% of all diagnoses are currently dead. 45% of cases are unresolved and some of those will die too. South Korea has tested the chit out of everyone that they can place anywhere near a known case, 99% of which are coming back negative, so if there's a large pool of asymptomatic cases to make the mortality rates less terrifying then they're hiding awfully well. Yeah it's technically more akin to flu than to SARS/MERS, 2% is linearly closer to 0.02 than it is to 10, but 2% of the world is an awful lot of suffocating.

@Arthur Dailey "That’s interesting. Compared to NYC your overall hospitalization rate is much lower at 7% vs 20% but your under-45 hospitalization percentage is much higher 40%+ vs 21%." Selection bias, NYC as everywhere else that's overwhelmed is largely testing people sick enough to show up at the hospitals so milder cases aren't being measured. North Italy is showing a 15% death rate.

@ajla "I don’t know if the Diamond Princess is really the case to make the “overreacting” point. 712 infections out of 3711 passengers and crew is 19.2% infection rate. 10 deaths out of 712 is a 1.4% case fatality rate." Keep in mind that the Diamond Princess cluster started with one passenger and spread to 712 in about five weeks. The spread didn't just stop on its own at that point, it was stopped by removing the 3,000 uninfected passengers and crew from the ship. We don't have a sterile world to stop the experiment and remove ourselves to when our infection rate hits 20%. Extrapolate that out to 60-80% for this to burn out for lack of new victims, and add what the hospital situation will look like with 30% of the country sick at once, and 2M coffins probably won't be enough.

@Dan - One person shedding SARS-CoV-2 infects three others. The fact that it isn't lethal to 80% of its hosts means it is very adept at replication. One can debate the actual death rate but as we have seen in Wuhan province and Italy, the high death rates are mostly attributable to a overwhelmed health care system. An overwhelmed system will also result in deaths of unaffected people who require hospitalization due to a lack of resources. In British Columbia, our COVID -19 death rate has been relatively low and our health care system is holding but "we" created capacity by cancelling all elective non-emergent cases.