Item — HN Reader

Yes, the death rates are somewhere around 20x higher, and it is much more transmissable. The nytimes has a great graph showing the range of possible values for death rate and transmissability of the virus as compared to other historical viruses. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/learning/whats-going-on-i...

My only quibble is that the shape of the uncertainty shouldn't be a box, it should be oriented around a downward sloping line.

2 comments

The true death rate is unknown, the currently measured case fatality rate is 20X higher than the flu. This should be taken with a big grain of salt, because early case fatality rates are generally highly overestimated due to mostly testing people that have severe complications. The seasonal flu is much better researched.

The passengers on the diamond princess cruise ship [1] could give us a better estimate of the true death rate, because they all got tested regardless of symptoms. So far 4 out of 700 people have died (0.5%). The death rate for people 65+ with the seasonal flu is 0.9% [2]. If the coronavirus is as deadly as the flu we expect 7 people to die, if it is 20X as deadly as the flu we expect 140 people to die.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_on_c...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

Then why is the article author downplaying it so substantially?

This isn't the best article, it appears to be a student activity guide. I was just intending to link to the graphic that has appeared throughout the nytimes' coverage.

I meant the OP article.

How does the article downplay it? It's about how not to misrepresent the data.

"Red is too alarming, we should use blue" doesn't reconcile with the severity of the situation as far as I can tell.

I don't think that is an accurate characterization at all, what they were saying about color choice was more nuanced and allowed that things might get much worse. Why start with the most evocative "danger" mapping when there are a lot of unknowns?