SOURCE: https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464
Wall Street Journal ( Behind a paywall, unfortunately ):
While Italy is being slammed by the speed of the coronavirus’s spread, the ultimate mortality rate won’t be as devastating as the early numbers predict:
Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time.
That’s more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italy’s case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%.
WHAT ABOUT SPECIFIC DEFINED POPULATION?
The Stanford doctors do the same calculation for other defined populations, such as planes that evacuated U.S. citizens from Wuhan (all the passengers were tested), Iceland’s population, and NBA players.
In the case of the Wuhan evacuees, only 0.9% of the Wuhan travelers tested positive. Extrapolating that data out to Wuhan as a whole would mean that 178,000 Wuhan residents were probably infected, a number 30 times greater than the number China identified as having the virus.
Accepting as true China’s claim that only 3,287 people died (OK, this is questionable, but that’s the data we officially have ), the real mortality rate would be 1.85% — which is still a high mortality rate, but less than the original 4% claimed.
I hope they’re right. There also seems to be some good anecdotal evidence that heat and, more importantly UV, seem to mitigate the worst effects of this virus. Check out the data from India. They have over a billion people and there are no overflowing emergency rooms. Miami Dade Florida has had uncharacteristically sunny and beautiful weather the past two weeks. They have 500 cases and Zero deaths so far. https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/96dd742462124fa0b38ddedb9b25e429
Hopefully we see this trend continue as the southern states head into summer followed by up north.
This elementary fact has been the topic of a lot of analysis and discussion @ FR. (Wastoute was actually the first one who began advocating it awhile ago.) But, no matter how often it's pointed out - and now being echoed by a range of medical professionals, including Dr Birx a few days ago - there's still a lot of confusion regarding various statistical projections.
So, we're left with this core analytical truth, but then we have endless repetition of false analyses, no matter how often they are pointed out. In many ways, the ongoing debate is like "inside baseball" or the game within the game.
It doesn't matter if you actually believe it's an extinction event or 'just the flu'. Rather, what's relevant is how much one can flog a certain position in order to drive media attention and perhaps manipulate political opinion. I mean, take me for example: I could just as easily drive a twitter account either way for fun or profit.
FR actually condones this behavior itself, since it would be easy enough to establish a policy that mandated using only valid statistical measures. That is, any thread or any poster who kept insisting on posting "cases" as some kind of important, meaningful factor would be warned, then bounced. Sure, maybe throw in pseudo-stats as a reference example of media manipulation, but otherwise, it's simply a designed effort to undermine the president.
Oh, I get that many here might not necessarily be sleeper cells and many are actually posting in good faith, but they might be unaware of how/why they are being manipulated into advancing an adversarial agenda. Look no further than all the questionable web sites running so-called stats - they should be universally banned. The only true number is the one being collected from actual data sources. Wiki has it's political issues, but in terms of straight-up, no debate data, they are an excellent source.