Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Viking]

I strongly object to the insipid thread title. I suggest "weareallgonnadie" instead.

Sure, if we concomitantly rename the Ukraine thread to "Putin will kill all Ukrainians".

The relatively low detection rate and the fact that the disease is still spreading indicates that we are missing cases, and possibly that it is not quite as infectious as we feared.

The UK, like almost any country in Europe except Italy, is early in its outbreak; and given that a lot of infected people are quarantined in some form, the virus is at a disadvantage compared to the flu.

As things stand mortality is probably over-estimated.

Which figure? As I posted earlier, there are good reasons to believe that the virus can kill 1-2% of those infected. Of course, this number is tightly connected to the treatment the patients receive; how good, and how early.

According to the source I am currently looking at, South Korea now has a case fatality rate of 0.84%. This a country that has taken testing to an extreme level:

Nearly 20,000 people are being tested every day for coronavirus in South Korea, more people per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Rachel's sample is quickly shipped off to a nearby laboratory where staff are working 24 hours a day to process the results.

There is no shortage of testing kits in South Korea. Four companies have been given approval to make them. It means the country has the capacity to test 140,000 samples a week.

This means that

1) Potentially vulnerable patients can be discovered early and given treatment early, driving the fatality rate down
2) Fewer hospitals are overwhelmed as more people can be quarantined, also driving the fatality rate down
3) The fatality rate is more accurate

If 5 percent of all infected cases are potentially critical, then the fatality rate will creep towards 5 percent locally if hospitals get overwhelmed. On the other hand, if treatment is effective, the fatality rate will creep towards a figure somewhere below 1 percent.