<story><title>Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths</title><url>https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mns</author><text>I do have one question and I&amp;#x27;m asking this seriously, not to start an argument or to attack someone. I also saw this here in a lot of the posts about covid-19. We have numbers, but every time people tend to ignore them or say we should not trust the numbers, take them with a grain of salt, &amp;quot;I think this is way worse, it&amp;#x27;s going to get way worse&amp;quot; and so on. It&amp;#x27;s like there is this thirst for disaster or some global drama everywhere, and this is not something that I would expect from Hackernews. If the numbers don&amp;#x27;t align with our hopes or fears, we should take them with a grain of salt and trust the gut feeling of whoever comments. It&amp;#x27;s quite weird to see that when it comes to this, people seem to think that it&amp;#x27;s some sort of conspiracy, China is hiding numbers, now EU is not doing things properly, as I see it everywhere &amp;quot;my country can&amp;#x27;t have 0 cases, I know that our airport is a big hub and it can&amp;#x27;t be, we will be doomed as we probably have hundred of cases instead of none and our government is not doing anything&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying that this virus is not a threat and I worry for my parents as this could be a big issue for their condition, but we&amp;#x27;ve gone down the rabbit hole with the hysteria in the press and online and it&amp;#x27;s scary to see this need for a global pandemic and the urge to constantly feed the panic monster.</text></item><item><author>nik_s</author><text>The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead&amp;#x2F;(infected + dead)) is that you&amp;#x27;re assuming that the infected won&amp;#x27;t die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead &amp;#x2F; (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of SARS of 9.6% [2].&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I think all these statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt - I doubt that the numbers we are seeing are of very high quality, given the political and cultural pressures in China to underreport, the lack of test kits, corona virus deaths being attributed to other diseases, ... On the flip side, it&amp;#x27;s very likely that mild cases will never be reported, which in turn would decrease the mortality rate.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&amp;#x2F;apps&amp;#x2F;opsdashboard&amp;#x2F;index.html#&amp;#x2F;bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&amp;#x2F;apps&amp;#x2F;opsdashboard&amp;#x2F;index.h...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[edit: corrected the formula - thank you @anhner and @11thEarlOfMar for spotting the mistake]&lt;p&gt;[edit: indicated that there&amp;#x27;s also a chance of under-reporting mild cases - my edit coincided with @Tenoke&amp;#x27;s post - sorry for noticing this late @Tenoke]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajsnigrutin</author><text>The problem is in the healthcare capacities.&lt;p&gt;I live in a country with ~2mio people. If you&amp;#x27;re patient zero here, you get a comfy private room, your own bed, 5 doctors, 10 nurses, whole research teams, respirators, priority with all the tests, examinations, etc. Same for patient 1, 2, 3.&lt;p&gt;If 200k people get infected (10% of population), and only 10% of those need extra medical care, that&amp;#x27;s 20.000 people. We don&amp;#x27;t have that many hospital beds, doctors, respirators.. probably not even enough medicine (some test have shown that malaria medicine and aids medicine works on some people). You get thrown into an army tent or a school gym with many more ill people, and you get almost zero resources. Need a respirator? Sorry, only 5 available at that location, and are used on other people.. or kids.. or pregnant women... and you can just slowly suffocate.&lt;p&gt;China built a hospital in a couple of days. I don&amp;#x27;t think there&amp;#x27;s a country in EU that can do anything remotely fast as that.. we probably need 10 days just to discuss where to put the emergency tents, and even then we&amp;#x27;d get protesters not wanting them there. Same probably in the USA.&lt;p&gt;We also don&amp;#x27;t have companies making respirators and other medical equipment. Large countries who do, are making them for their own hospitals (if they&amp;#x27;re not stuck in paperpushing hell with the government).&lt;p&gt;Basically, if there&amp;#x27;s a wide-spread epidemic, a lot of people will get really really fscked.</text></comment>
<story><title>Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths</title><url>https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mns</author><text>I do have one question and I&amp;#x27;m asking this seriously, not to start an argument or to attack someone. I also saw this here in a lot of the posts about covid-19. We have numbers, but every time people tend to ignore them or say we should not trust the numbers, take them with a grain of salt, &amp;quot;I think this is way worse, it&amp;#x27;s going to get way worse&amp;quot; and so on. It&amp;#x27;s like there is this thirst for disaster or some global drama everywhere, and this is not something that I would expect from Hackernews. If the numbers don&amp;#x27;t align with our hopes or fears, we should take them with a grain of salt and trust the gut feeling of whoever comments. It&amp;#x27;s quite weird to see that when it comes to this, people seem to think that it&amp;#x27;s some sort of conspiracy, China is hiding numbers, now EU is not doing things properly, as I see it everywhere &amp;quot;my country can&amp;#x27;t have 0 cases, I know that our airport is a big hub and it can&amp;#x27;t be, we will be doomed as we probably have hundred of cases instead of none and our government is not doing anything&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying that this virus is not a threat and I worry for my parents as this could be a big issue for their condition, but we&amp;#x27;ve gone down the rabbit hole with the hysteria in the press and online and it&amp;#x27;s scary to see this need for a global pandemic and the urge to constantly feed the panic monster.</text></item><item><author>nik_s</author><text>The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead&amp;#x2F;(infected + dead)) is that you&amp;#x27;re assuming that the infected won&amp;#x27;t die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead &amp;#x2F; (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of SARS of 9.6% [2].&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I think all these statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt - I doubt that the numbers we are seeing are of very high quality, given the political and cultural pressures in China to underreport, the lack of test kits, corona virus deaths being attributed to other diseases, ... On the flip side, it&amp;#x27;s very likely that mild cases will never be reported, which in turn would decrease the mortality rate.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&amp;#x2F;apps&amp;#x2F;opsdashboard&amp;#x2F;index.html#&amp;#x2F;bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&amp;#x2F;apps&amp;#x2F;opsdashboard&amp;#x2F;index.h...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[edit: corrected the formula - thank you @anhner and @11thEarlOfMar for spotting the mistake]&lt;p&gt;[edit: indicated that there&amp;#x27;s also a chance of under-reporting mild cases - my edit coincided with @Tenoke&amp;#x27;s post - sorry for noticing this late @Tenoke]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>I think being skeptical of numbers from China is reasonable.&lt;p&gt;Historically speaking even inside China it is a pretty well known quantity (even openly spoken of in China) that local governments are hesitant to give bad news to the central government until it is too late and so on.  The result usually is the central government is behind the ball dealing in broad (sometimes less than useful) strokes until things are resolved.&lt;p&gt;As far as any conclusions you can draw such as &amp;quot;well it must be much worse&amp;quot;.  I think that is pure speculation.&lt;p&gt;Specific speculation that isn&amp;#x27;t founded in much and IMO not helpful.  The scale and wonkyness of China&amp;#x27;s efforts could be because this is a very dangerous &amp;#x2F; misunderstood disease ... or the massive efforts simply a byproduct if poor internal information &amp;#x2F; a product of the political nature of China.. panic by their leadership (historically they&amp;#x27;re very wary of any unrest of their own population), or both.&lt;p&gt;Skepticism of some information from countries with proven track records of not being forthcoming &amp;#x2F; have had issues with accurate information is reasonable.   Conclusions based in nothing, not so much.</text></comment>