What will the mortality rate likely settle to be for Covid-19?
What does everyone think?
Here are some numbers for reference:
How does mortality differ across countries? Examining the number of deaths per confirmed case and per 100,000 population. A global comparison.
coronavirus.jhu.edu
No way to tell unless they can have a good estimate on how many unconfirmed cases and deaths there have been.
Back in March I seem to recall the statement being made that 80% of cases would have mild, or even no, symptoms. Thats a pretty big problem for reporting since you must assume that many of those people will simply never get tested because they either didn't know they had it or they just didn't get tested because they quarantined for 2 weeks and the symptoms went away.
Back at the start I saw many people claiming that they had Covid19 but also admitting the never got tested. So these people would not be part of the official numbers. If they ever had it at all.
Then you would need to factor in false positives and negatives. What % of confirmed cases are false positives and what % of negative tests are actually people with Covid.
Even with deaths youd have to imagine that there are at least some covid related deaths that haven't been recorded.
The rate of confirmed deaths to confirmed cases should reliably represent the MAXIMUM mortality rate.
So if people think the USA is doing the worst job with this then you can see that the worst case scenario is a 2% mortality rate.
If you start to consider factors like retirement homes and cases where patients contracted the disease in healthcare facilities you can begin to bring that 2% down.
So if you are under 40 in a rural town the the USA then you might have an almost zero chance of catching the disease plus an almost zero chance of dying even if you did catch it.
In a large city this would change though.
You then have to factor in asymptomatic and unrecorded cases etc. You could end up with a lower mortality rate.
It's kind of interesting because we have the same kind of issues with the flu it seems. I am sure many of us have had the flu but never actually had it confirmed and therefore are not part of official numbers. Meaning that the mortality rate must be lower than what is reported.
In fact with the flu a lot of people show up with symptoms and get tested and do not have the flu at all. Meaning there is a ton of other shit out there that gives flu symptoms but isn't flu. A lot of times you might have thought you have the flu and actually you don't know what you've got.
Covid19 is going to be similar but the problem we have is our media outlets just reporting cases day after day without any disclaimers.
Still, I think we could confidently say some things about this.
It appears to be both more contagious and more deadly than the regular seasonal flu.
We, the public, are not being presented with the full picture.
