<story><title>Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-military-sympt/coronavirus-clue-most-cases-aboard-u-s-aircraft-carrier-are-symptom-free-idUSKCN21Y2GB</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>system2</author><text>If 0.37% is true, why are the hospitals in this shape?</text></item><item><author>manfredo</author><text>Random testing in Germany has also revealed higher than expected rates of people with antibodies. Their IFR (infected fatality rate) was 2% overall based on non-random testing. Random testing has yielded an IFR or 0.37%.&lt;p&gt;This does not increase the risk. These tests only test people who &lt;i&gt;had&lt;/i&gt; coronavirus. The larger this portion, the more herd immunity there is in the population. It implies that there &lt;i&gt;were&lt;/i&gt; a larger than expected number of people who had the virus, at some point in time. But that&amp;#x27;s a lagging indicator.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yomly</author><text>Imagine all 65M people in the UK caught the virus then a 10,000 case fatality number would give a rate of 0.015%.&lt;p&gt;The rate itself has no time element so it tells you nothing about the number of people in hospital right now and hence isn&amp;#x27;t very illustrative of how hospitals can be swamped by this disease.&lt;p&gt;More interestingly (for me at least) is that the mortality rate is dependent on a patient&amp;#x27;s access to a ventilator. This means if you caught the virus early in the spread of the pandemic your odds of surviving are substantially higher than if you caught it right at the peak of infection.&lt;p&gt;This is impossible to reflect in a simple global mortality rate and so really paints a different picture of the virus - the death rate in South Korea vs other places really highlights this.&lt;p&gt;I guess to your point, hospitals are more in this way because the virus is so infectious, rather than it being a universally dangerous disease as may be seen from a higher mortality rate. Remember, a high number of people experience little to no symptoms from catching this.&lt;p&gt;This variability in symptoms doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be as true for other lethal diseases like say malaria or dengue fever</text></comment>
<story><title>Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-military-sympt/coronavirus-clue-most-cases-aboard-u-s-aircraft-carrier-are-symptom-free-idUSKCN21Y2GB</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>system2</author><text>If 0.37% is true, why are the hospitals in this shape?</text></item><item><author>manfredo</author><text>Random testing in Germany has also revealed higher than expected rates of people with antibodies. Their IFR (infected fatality rate) was 2% overall based on non-random testing. Random testing has yielded an IFR or 0.37%.&lt;p&gt;This does not increase the risk. These tests only test people who &lt;i&gt;had&lt;/i&gt; coronavirus. The larger this portion, the more herd immunity there is in the population. It implies that there &lt;i&gt;were&lt;/i&gt; a larger than expected number of people who had the virus, at some point in time. But that&amp;#x27;s a lagging indicator.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xenonite</author><text>These were among the very first cases in Germany where capacity was abundant, hence the low fatality rate.&lt;p&gt;Also, this is a “up to now” value, more cases might turn out fatal.&lt;p&gt;“Only” 7 deaths is furthermore not a good data basis for calculating this number.&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the report is not even public nor peer reviewed. So I can’t even cite it here. However you find criticism of the study by Prof. Streeck online.</text></comment>