[BostonCard]

New paper in Nature Medicine estimates mortality at about 1.4% of symptomatic patients; the estimate is that 50% of patients will be symptomatic so the overall CFR of all infected people is 0.7%, which is awful but not quite as bad as the estimate based on confirmed cases (3.4%).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7

They did some clever stuff looking at the proportion of expats who tested positive after evacuating to get a sense of the disease prevalence.

BC

There are a lot of different CFR estimates coming out, almost daily now.  Each uses different methods or data from a different country.  As an interested person, I'd say the best thing is to just take a meta-analytic approach and average the CFRs instead of worrying about which used the best methodology*.  I suspect that would put it in the 1-1.5% range.

*The only exception would be to totally ignore the new preprint, which I won't even link to, claiming a CFR of something like 0.05%.  They also claim a staggering number of asymptomatic cases.  That beggars the imagination.

We won't know until we have a serological test and we figure out who had asymptomatic (or minimally symptomatic) disease on a population level.  I think there are some ways of estimating, if you can identify subsets of people who are thoroughly screened (for example, isolated contacts) and can calculate the proportion of asymptomatic positives.  I do think the 3.4% number the WHO calculated is artificially inflated and I suspect it's probably around 1%.

The two cruise ships that had widespread infection might be a good place to test that hypothesis; I wish I knew what the breakdown of symptoms was.

ANother interesting place to look: Luxemburg.  They reported 149 cases overnight, out of a population of 600,000.  One could actually test the entire population.

BC

[BostonCard]

New paper in Nature Medicine estimates mortality at about 1.4% of symptomatic patients; the estimate is that 50% of patients will be symptomatic so the overall CFR of all infected people is 0.7%, which is awful but not quite as bad as the estimate based on confirmed cases (3.4%).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7

They did some clever stuff looking at the proportion of expats who tested positive after evacuating to get a sense of the disease prevalence.

BC

There are a lot of different CFR estimates coming out, almost daily now.  Each uses different methods or data from a different country.  As an interested person, I'd say the best thing is to just take a meta-analytic approach and average the CFRs instead of worrying about which used the best methodology*.  I suspect that would put it in the 1-1.5% range.

*The only exception would be to totally ignore the new preprint, which I won't even link to, claiming a CFR of something like 0.05%.  They also claim a staggering number of asymptomatic cases.  That beggars the imagination.

We won't know until we have a serological test and we figure out who had asymptomatic (or minimally symptomatic) disease on a population level.  I think there are some ways of estimating, if you can identify subsets of people who are thoroughly screened (for example, isolated contacts) and can calculate the proportion of asymptomatic positives.  I do think the 3.4% number the WHO calculated is artificially inflated and I suspect it's probably around 1%.

The two cruise ships that had widespread infection might be a good place to test that hypothesis; I wish I knew what the breakdown of symptoms was.

ANother interesting place to look: Luxemburg.  They reported 149 cases overnight, out of a population of 600,000.  One could actually test the entire population.

BC