CDC using unethical method to calculate Covid-19 mortality rate, not the same as they use for flu

Then don’t watch them, according to talk radio no one does anyway.

Horse hockey. Every aspect of testing requires FDA and/or CDC approvals from development to fielding to processing of the tests as well as certification of the labs.

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Yes it is true. I think it was 9 days

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And be specific?

Get some rest.

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I knew you couldn’t support the claim but Thainks for removing all doubt

As of right now the CDC is reporting 7,038 known cases and 97 known deaths on their website.

That is a 1.38% mortality rate.

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I honestly think that Singapore was a huge eye opener for me. A country with a population of over 5k per km2 compared to 90 per km2 in the US. You would think that they would be wrecked but they used the WHO testing and had the best curve seen. South Korea used WHO tests and had similar results.

Both have a significantly higher population density than the US but they did well. We should strive to emulate what they did and that means using existing testing that has proven to be effective.

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The who and CDC created their tests concurrently

Yes, you now understand that I am agreeing with you. :grin:

We aren’t seeing the whole picture as to who is being infected yet we use the numbers we have to reflect overall mortality. Which is inaccurate. But so is the flu. Not everyone who gets the flu reports it, so we have to guess how many got it to estimate the mortality rate. If you’re hospitalized with the flu your mortality rate is significantly higher than .01%, if you are over 80 your mortality rate is significantly higher than .01%.

They have effectively mass produced the WHO test in multiple countries, we haven’t had the same success with our test. The testing is going to become more and more of a factor in the coming 2 weeks, we need to get these out there now.

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Over 5 million have already been distributed

Your math is flawed…

60,000,000x
0.05%

= 30,000

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Correct. I meant 0.5%. Fixed, thanks

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Yes. This is a big difference. But they have been clear on what it is and what it does and doesn’t mean, at least where I have seen it. They have made clear that if you get it that does not mean that is the chance you will die. Rather than their misrepresenting, I think its more others who run with the figure and they misrepresent what it means.
My guess is the difference may be that flu has a history to project the number of people who may have it and this virus has not such history.

So just bill maher. One person.

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It’s hard. :wink:

Uh … just so everyone knows what .5% mortality is, although it looks like the original error (not yours) was in the decimal “.5%” is.

We get the math. It is taught in 5th grade. Its not that hard.

Under your scenario though, 300k is not all that large. The mortality rate in the US is 8.3 per 1000. So .0083 times 60m = 498,000 deaths naturally occurring anyways. An that is the US rate. I am sure the Corona Virus will add to the percentage, but we dont know how much. Even if the mortality rate doubled, that would take it up to 17 deaths per 1000. I attended one funeral last year. So this year I may have to attend 2.

Like Roosevelt said, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”

You are the one who felt the need to correct someone based on a typo :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Could care less about the rest of your posts cold views.

Been reading a lot the past few days (what else is there to do?)

We need to start testing not only sick people but well people.

All the worst case scenarios on health network breakdown and massive spike in deaths are based on assumptions that left unchecked, somewhere between 40-60% of the population will be infected. This is based on an apparent r(0) of 2.6-2.8.

However, we are not seeing an infection rate of 40-60%.

Far from it. We are seeing an infection rate of around 2%-3% in the hardest hit areas of Asia (I’m going mostly of data from South Korea, the only country to my knowledge that is testing everybody, not just sick people).

Now some of this is because of mitigation efforts to control the spread.

However we need to know accurate numbers in order to make the best decisions.

And there’s some evidence coming out to suggest casual exposure doesn’t spread the virus as easy as we thought…that you need more prolonged exposure.

This is why I’ve been an advocate for so much testing…everything we are doing is based on modeling on somewhat biased data sets.

The closest we have to such a data set is the Diamond Princess. There are the conditions were fulfilled…a somewhat reasonable representative distribution (although it is slightly skewed towards an older population), and prolonged exposure.

There the overall infection rate was 16%…but when you break it down by age, it was 23-30% among passengers >70 and closer to 8% for everyone else.

If these are the correct numbers, this would indicate that the virus is nowhere near as communicable as we think it is, and a rethink of strategy targeted to protect our older population is in order.

I am not suggesting such a strategy yet because we don’t have the data.

We should be making every effort to get it.

*Im getting tired of hearing about ■■■■■■■ delays…now I’m reading we are short on swabs for the tests? Are you ■■■■■■■ kidding me?

*Ramp this up…go to a few hot zones around the US and test a large sample of asymptomatic, symptomatic and seriously symptomatic patients there.

*If we have serum antibody tests ready, go back to the hot zone of Wuhan right now and do a series of what they call serosurveys on a large representative sample of Wuhan’s population. These are essentially after the fact tests that can tell whether one has been infected since the immune system will show evidence of this weeks after the fact. Classify these people as to whether they showed symptoms or didn’t show them, and how seriously they got sick.

If anyone is asking, yes this is a change of mindset for me (not for the testing…I’ve been an advocate of that for some time). What else have I had to do over the last few weeknights but read?

The more I read…the more I realize these projections of worse case are modeled on data that’s mostly biased.

There’s no doubt we will still see the health care system under strain starting…well, starting now.

But we are flying semi-blind as to the best way to cope with that.

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