[AR] Re: FW: [NASA HQ News] March 19 Administrator Statement on Agency Response to Coronavirus
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2020 17:55:18 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 20 Mar 2020, David Summers wrote:
While the infection rate may be unknown, the death rate is easier to know.
Barring a coverup, the numbers seem right.
5 deaths out of 244 is about a 2% death rate, which is rather high,
suggesting a good many unrecognized mild cases.
We don't have very good data on mild, unrecognized cases, but helpfully,
we do have some: essentially everyone who was on the Diamond Princess got
tested. There were just under 700 infected under the botched quarantine,
and (at last report I saw) there have been 8 deaths. And that rate is
biased high because cruise-ship passengers tend to be elderly, and it's
abundantly clear that the death rate from this virus starts to rise
rapidly as age goes past 60. An attempt to combine the Diamond Princess
data with Chinese age-distribution data suggested that the true all-ages
death rate is about 0.5%.
This number does assume that sick people generally get the care they need.
It could go rather higher if medical facilities were overwhelmed (or, as
in too much of the Third World, nonexistent).
Better data is urgently needed, and people are working on it.
Henry
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