CDC revises fatality rate
-
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current "best estimate" for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders.
The CDC offers the new estimates in its "COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios," which are meant to guide hospital administrators in "assessing resource needs" and help policy makers "evaluate the potential effects of different community mitigation strategies." It says "the planning scenarios are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the Federal government."
The CDC's five scenarios include one based on "a current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." That scenario assumes a "basic reproduction number" of 2.5, meaning the average carrier can be expected to infect that number of people in a population with no immunity. It assumes an overall symptomatic case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.4 percent, falling to 0.05 percent among people younger than 50 and rising to 1.3 percent among people 65 and older. For people in the middle (ages 50–64), the estimated CFR is 0.2 percent.
That "best estimate" scenario also assumes that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, meaning the total number of infections is more than 50 percent larger than the number of symptomatic cases. It therefore implies that the IFR is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent. By contrast, the projections that the CDC made in March, which predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.
-
It’s always something.
-
@jon-nyc said in CDC revises fatality rate:
Didn’t you post this a couple days ago?
No, that was Loki, and Loki didn’t link to an analysis from Reason, he just linked directly to the CDC. So that would imply that This analyst and Loki used a similar method to determine their numbers from the CDC data.
-
Hey, not saying they were right or not, just pointing out that they came to similar results.
-
-
It would be nice to know how they came up with these numbers. Presumably the numbers were crunched at the CDC by people qualified to crunch them. I find it nearly as difficult to believe that those people would have made obvious blunders, as I find the results themselves.
-
@Mik said in CDC revises fatality rate:
I don't trust much of any numbers analysis I read about this right now. The numbers ignore the human cost entirely. If we just let it run rampant we may as well just euthanize our elderly population in group settings.
Regardless of framings like this, the question of what a society should do in response to covid does not boil down to whether a society cares about the lives of its citizens, elderly or otherwise.
-
@Horace said in CDC revises fatality rate:
It would be nice to know how they came up with these numbers. Presumably the numbers were crunched at the CDC by people qualified to crunch them. I find it nearly as difficult to believe that those people would have made obvious blunders, as I find the results themselves.
I don’t see how any amount of credentialing can bridge the gap between that estimate and the reality of NYC.
-
-
-
Remember the CDC shows death modeling at 65+. We know several states have 70%+ mortality from nursing homes where the average age is 80+.
I believe that younger people don’t generally die of this and that includes the vast vast majority of those under 60.
To say the CDC is dead wrong is fascinating to me.
-
At the end of this, we will find (IMO of course) that the most prevalent misleading numbers we were all fed will be the death count at the beginning of the pandemic where lots of folk clinging to life are pushed over the edge by Covid. Using that number to extrapolate much about the severity of the virus amongst those not clinging to life, is a non sequitur that will be seen to have been used over and over both scientifically and of course rhetorically.
-
@Horace said in CDC revises fatality rate:
At the end of this, we will find (IMO of course) that the most prevalent misleading numbers we were all fed will be the death count at the beginning of the pandemic where lots of folk clinging to life are pushed over the edge by Covid. Using that number to extrapolate much about the severity of the virus amongst those not clinging to life, is a non sequitur that will be seen to have been used over and over both scientifically and of course rhetorically.
I agree but when it comes out the argument will be that it is the past and therefore irrelevant. It will become whadaboutism.
