I think the numbers from China are basically completely meaningless other than signaling ‘higher than they want you to know’.
As much as I hate to say it, the cruise ship that currently represents ~50% of the PCR-confirmed out of China cases is going to be a gold mine of information, as you KNOW where and when they were infected and can track their outcomes. Will be biased towards the elderly a bit.
Let’s take the out-of-China data as reported at the moment I am writing this as provisionally true due to efforts at contact tracing which are robust in large chunks of the world. I suspect there are a lot of low-symptom clusters that are being missed, as evidenced that you can have South Korea suddenly up and find 50 people and Iran suddenly up and report 2 deaths out of nowhere. But it’s a baseline for now. 1095 confirmed, and 11 dead, for a naive ratio of ~1%. But in the case studies I have seen, most deaths seem to be happening after ~3 weeks of illness, ~80% of cases in well-documented clusters resemble flu and nothing worse for a week or so, and 20% go longer with worse disease and risk mortality. So if we go back 2 weeks we get to 227 confirmations and a naive ratio of 5%, and 3 weeks we get to 110 and a naive ratio of 10%. A lot of the people who are seriously ill and dying now were not caught in that early time though, so combined with the likely missing of low-symptom clusters I think the estimates of mortality rates of 1% to 3% seem quite reasonable. There will be higher morbidity, and I have seen case studies of SARS survivors that they often have chronic issues for the rest of their lives.
Age structure of the population will make different nations differently susceptible to death as well, from what I am seeing death rates may not be rising above 1% until people are in their forties or fifties and reach 15% for those in their eighties.
Anyways, I think the outside-of-China numbers are still low. Many nations are not applying molecular tests to those who do not have travel history to hot spots and will thus necessarily miss local transmission if the initial traveler was not caught. We just saw Iran suddenly report two deaths with no foreign contacts testing positive for the virus and shut down a city of 1.5 million people. If we assume a death rate of 1% and a disease course of 2 weeks, with the sheer infectivity of this disease I suspect there are several hundred infected in Iran alone.
I think the numbers from China are basically completely meaningless other than signaling ‘higher than they want you to know’.
As much as I hate to say it, the cruise ship that currently represents ~50% of the PCR-confirmed out of China cases is going to be a gold mine of information, as you KNOW where and when they were infected and can track their outcomes. Will be biased towards the elderly a bit.
Let’s take the out-of-China data as reported at the moment I am writing this as provisionally true due to efforts at contact tracing which are robust in large chunks of the world. I suspect there are a lot of low-symptom clusters that are being missed, as evidenced that you can have South Korea suddenly up and find 50 people and Iran suddenly up and report 2 deaths out of nowhere. But it’s a baseline for now. 1095 confirmed, and 11 dead, for a naive ratio of ~1%. But in the case studies I have seen, most deaths seem to be happening after ~3 weeks of illness, ~80% of cases in well-documented clusters resemble flu and nothing worse for a week or so, and 20% go longer with worse disease and risk mortality. So if we go back 2 weeks we get to 227 confirmations and a naive ratio of 5%, and 3 weeks we get to 110 and a naive ratio of 10%. A lot of the people who are seriously ill and dying now were not caught in that early time though, so combined with the likely missing of low-symptom clusters I think the estimates of mortality rates of 1% to 3% seem quite reasonable. There will be higher morbidity, and I have seen case studies of SARS survivors that they often have chronic issues for the rest of their lives.
Age structure of the population will make different nations differently susceptible to death as well, from what I am seeing death rates may not be rising above 1% until people are in their forties or fifties and reach 15% for those in their eighties.
Anyways, I think the outside-of-China numbers are still low. Many nations are not applying molecular tests to those who do not have travel history to hot spots and will thus necessarily miss local transmission if the initial traveler was not caught. We just saw Iran suddenly report two deaths with no foreign contacts testing positive for the virus and shut down a city of 1.5 million people. If we assume a death rate of 1% and a disease course of 2 weeks, with the sheer infectivity of this disease I suspect there are several hundred infected in Iran alone.