Morphy wrote on Apr 15
th, 2020 at 4:16pm:
It makes no sense from a medical point of view to record numbers this way.
How would you like to have the numbers reported instead?
The number of healthy people which died without any other causes? But that also does not reflect reality, because a large part of the population has preexisting causes.
Testing everyone everyday is a) not feasible b) also not a solution because then we run into a world of trouble with false positives etc.
You could look at comorbity numbers if you want. The values I have available say about 1% probability to die without any preexisting condition. With a preexisting one it is much higher. Then we can also factor age in etc. to make it even more complex.
The reality is: We have no perfect numbers and there exists no single number to capture it all. Any reported number is, by the very nature of the problem, not what is happening in reality. Its an estimate, with an error. Knowing what this error is, is as much worth as knowing the number.
And we don't know this error, but we can estimate it. And so on...
Which number would you like? The one which is likely too high, or the one which is likely too low?
One of the issues is, that accurately measuring this pandemic is very difficult.
What I like to do is just to compare all different countries, with all the different reporting standards, demographics etc. , take the lowest number, take the highest number, and reality might be somewhere in between. Or not. Thus, my guess is: probability to die once infected, averaged over quite everything, might be in the range 0.5% to 5%. Thus, an uncertainty on the order of a factor 10x. Which is still oversimplifying the problem considerably.
The overall effect of the pandemic in Switzerland is sometimes measured in "Übersterblichkeit", translated as excess mortality / extramortality. This is the number of deaths occuring at the moment versus the average expected number of deaths usually occuring at this time of the year.
It is spiking, faster than in a year with a heavy flu epidemic. Strongly for old people, very slightly for the younger ones. The only conclusion from that is: we currently have a problem and it seems to be worse than a heavy flu year, where no countermeasures were taken. For how much worse it will get, please consult your crystal ball, your gut feeling, or any educated guess from any modeling you can do
.
PS: I take the modeling, please. The result is probably not accurate. But if the other ones are correct, it's sheer luck.