I have a feeling that this comment could be directed at my
post #196 above, where I said:
To be clear, I did not mean that I don't care about people above 60, like my parents and my grandmother, because I do and have been very concerned for them (and others).
When I am in analytical mode, I turn off the emotional part of my brain to try to see facts and statistics in the most detached way possible, and I may not always phrase my ideas in the most tactful way.
What I meant to say is that the mortality rate of coronavirus is very surely exaggerated at present based on the cases from countries like China, Iran and Italy, which saw the highest numbers of reported cases so far.
The WHO stated that "globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases have died". But
scientists now think that the real mortality rate is closer to 0.9%. It's still more than the flu, but it's already 4 times lower than the authorities thought last week.
But every country has different rules about testing. I called my doctor because I have had mild flu-like symptoms for 5 days and I was shocked to learn that the current policy in Belgium is that only people with severe symptoms like pneumonia or respiratory insufficiency could be tested for coronavirus (and only a few hospitals do the test). My doctor told me not to bother because even serious cases don't necessarily get tested by hospitals! It goes without saying that with such strict criteria over 90% of carriers won't know it as they can't get tested, which in turn completely skews the statistics and make it look like the mortality rate is far higher than it really is.
At present
South Korea is the country that conducted the most extensive testing per capita : 5x more people per capita have been tested than in Italy, 10x more than in the UK or the Netherlands, and 750x more than in the USA.
What's more, the epidemic in South Korea started on 20th January (much earlier than Europe) and has been relatively well contained over the past week. So what is the mortality rate in South Korea?
As of today, over 180,000 South Koreans have been tested, of which 7979 were positive for Covid-19 and 67 died. That's a mortality rate of 0.8%, close to the new official estimates of 0.9%. That's still 8 or 9x more than the seasonal flu, but not nearly as bad as the 3.4% originally announced.
The Chinese province of Guangdong has the second best testing per capita.
They identified 1356 cases, among which 8 died. That's a case fatality rate of 0.59% - even lower than South Korea.
Italy now has 15,113 cases and 1016 deaths. That's a massive 6.6% mortality rate. I think that the reason for that is that too many people with mild symptoms haven't been tested. If we take the 0.8% of South Korea as being closer to the actual mortality rate, then we could extrapolate that approximately 125,000 Italians have been contaminated to date (not 15,000 as official data shows).
So going back to my assertion that "Covid-19 may not have a
higher mortality than seasonal influenza, at least in people under 60". The chart below shows the mortality rate by age group based only on the confirmed cases in China. But China tested only a fraction of its huge population, which is what caused the WHO to originally report a mortality rate of 3.4%. So all percentages in the chart should be divided by 4 to get a more reasonable estimate.
In other words, the real mortality rate would be:
- 0% under 10 years old
- 0.05% from 10 to 39 years old
- 0.1% from 40 to 49 years old
- 0.3% from 50 to 59 years old
- 0.9% from 60 to 69 years old
- 2% from 70 to 79 years old
- 3.7% from 80 years old
The seasonal flu's case fatality rate is 0.1%, so my initial doubt was correct to say that Coronavirus was less deadly than the flu for people under 50 at least (not 60 as I wrote). It still represent considerable danger for the elderly population (over 70) and it should in no way be underestimated.