10x more lethal = 1%

Posted on: March 11, 2020 at 10:59:03 CT

The 3.4% mortality figure “is certainly an overestimate,” Tom Frieden, a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and New York City health commissioner, said by email.

Frieden said he expects that the global fatality rate for the disease, called Covid-19, will end up below 1%. In the U.K., the death rate may also be lower than that threshold, the government’s chief medical adviser, Chris Whitty, told a parliamentary committee Thursday.

......About 80% of people who get coronavirus have only mild symptoms, according to the WHO. Some experience none at all, and different testing regimes across the world cloud the picture further. If many cases go unrecognized, it allows the virus to stealthily gain a foothold in communities as well as evade tallying in the WHO ledger that experts use for analysis.

“A lot of people are asymptomatic,” said Rosanna Peeling, director of the International Diagnostics Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “We’re only seeing the cases that are confirmed and the cases of people presenting to the hospital because they can’t breathe.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/coronavirus-s-true-lethal-power-still-eludes-disease-experts