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Daily coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - April 9
This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
Looks like another 6.6 million people filed for unemployment in the US last week, putting us at at least 10% unemployment.
Your link to the study broke. The thread you linked has a new one.
I'm not sure what to make of this all. The missing link is the previously known infections in Gangelt. With that, we'd have at least some semblance of a hint of how this generalizes to the entire country, but without, these numbers are kind of meaningless. I've read (without citation) that our numbers indicate 5% had it at some point, but even that is kind of hard to generalize: Is the quota of known/total cases there better or worse than elsewhere?
Regarding your question: Mortality and Lethality are different things: Mortality is the probability of dying to the virus, period. Lethality is the probability of dying if you get the virus. So Mortality = Lethality * Level of infection. The Mortality is also the infection fatality rate (IFR).
They figured out that the virus has a 0.05% mortality, because the overall mortality is 0.1% and they saw a mortality of 0.15%. They observed a level of infection of 15%, so the lethality shakes out to be 0.33%. Which is close to what they observed by counting the covid-19 deaths. In other words: There weren't many excess deaths that were not attributed to covid-19. (Untreated heart attacks come to mind.)
There's an excellent visualization tool here including all countries with 50+ cases, which illustrates COVID-19 case trends (weekly new confirmed cases versus total cases).
Assuming marginally reliable data, it looks like most developed nations currently under lock-down have started to flatten their infection growth curves. It's also clear that we're nowhere near easing quarantines yet.
I've come to hate that kind of visualization a little bit.
1): It hides resurgence because it puts current cases in relation to total cases. We are nowhere near herd-immune enough to warrant that. If Wuhan had 100 new cases today, 140 tomorrow, 200 the day after and 800 in a week, that would be cause for concern, but the plot hides it by showing no lateral movement.
2): No adjustment for population. This one really grinds my gears because it's so easy to do. Express both numbers as a fraction of population and you're good.
That said, it's really good at capturing what level of exponential spread you have and differentiates nicely between the outcomes of wuhan-style lockdown and e.g. italy.