Diamond Princess data is somewhat biased toward the old end of the
curve, but not as much as you might think. True, cruise passengers
average middle-aged through old, but seriously unhealthy people over
eighty tend not to cruise as much, taking some off the top end. And
don't forget the numerous crew, who tend to range from twenties through
middle age. Sorry to dash the mild optimism, but overall all-ages death
rate in places with first-world hospitals that aren't overwhelmed
strongly tends to cluster around 1%. (And Diamond Princess data is
still evolving - the eighth death just happened, and over half the 712
known infected are still not recovered. I would guess a final death
total nearer 1.5% - closely mirroring the mildly-older age distribution.)
Henry
On 3/20/2020 2:55 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
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