Archived Facebook Coronavirus Posts: March 10th

[I'm transitioning a bunch of Facebook posts I made on the Coronavirus to my blog.  This was from March 10th]

Some comments on the data on this article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/…/how-bad-is-the-coronavirus-let-…

For the record:

My own prediction--based on various news items, the behavior of the virus in general, and *some* preliminary studies--is that we will ultimately find out the CFR to be on the bottom end of the range presented in this article (I think 0.5% is likely to be close and I don't even think it's the true bottom of the possible range) *but* we will ultimately see it as more easily transmissible than is currently being indicated by top health organizations like the WHO and the CDC.

The WHO has been pretty dismissive of the theories that the virus can propagate asymptomatically, whereas I have seen several case studies where asymptomatic transmission seems pretty well proven. Also, I've seen peer reviewed studies that indicate pretty strongly that the virus can spread over the air farther and more easily than the WHO has been indicating *and* linger on exposes surfaces a lot longer than they've been saying.

Oh, and one important caveat on this article: a crucial set of numbers this article does not deal with is the percentage of deaths *by age*. I know it is true of the flu as well that it kills the elderly much more commonly than anyone else . . . but I feel like this may be even more true for the coronavirus. For example, a full 99% of all deaths in Italy (at least initially) were people over 60 years old. So I think the CFR is going to vary heavily by percentage of elderly in a population.

You can see this in action by looking at what happened at the Life Care Center in Washington. This case is actually worse than most people realize, because the initial news headlines had it as "13 residents have died of COVID-19". In reality, a full 26 residents died in the span of about a week there, compared to a typical 3-6 residents a month who die normally. Only 13 of those residents tested positive for COVID-19 (2 were inconclusive)--but they *haven't done* post-mortem testing yet on 11 remaining. So it's a safe assumption that almost *all* of those 26 deaths were due to COVID-19; that's a CFR of at least 21% *so far* in that population. *And* there is another 40 or so residents still hospitalized and in serious condition; fewer than half of the original 120 residents were unaffected.

So, we can expect COVID-19 to be really bad when it hits a nursing home, and I expect the worst headlines going forward to follow the Life Care Center pattern.