Exactly. There were 712 cases on board the Diamond Princess, of which 14 died. That's 2% of cases in a group which you'd expect to contain a large proportion of elderly passengers. These people were all tested repeatedly regardless of symptoms, which reduces the sampling bias. I've seen other numbers which suggest a mortality rate of just below 1% in the wider population, which makes sense as the wider population is younger on the whole than the passengers on the Diamond Princess. I just did the calculation for the UK using the numbers from the Johns Hopkins CoViD-19 stats site, and that gave the 14% you mentioned because they report our biased testing numbers. The problem with that maths (mortality = deaths / cases) is that the numerator is roughly correct while the denominator is massively smaller than it should be. Anyway, even if my guess of 0.8 - 1.0% is right, that would be over half a million UK deaths without control measures. It's difficult isn't it? I and my immediate family are low risk even if infected, and I really want to get back to work. Like, desperately. But my 70-odd year old Dad with a severe pre-existing respiratory condition isn't expendable... EDIT: I buggered up the Diamond Princess maths. That's 2% of confirmed cases. You don't expect 100% of the population to be infected. There were 3711 people on board, which gives a community fatality rate of 0.38%
I think MC is verbalising the point I was getting at. Figures are deaths in relation to tests and we were very slow to test in comparison to say Germany. No one really knows how many have been infected, were asymptomatic, had mild symptoms and put it down to other illnesses. But deaths to population of the countries affected are less than 1% and much less half a million predicted by imperial college.
Just take the deaths per million and divide by 10,000 to get percentage deaths of population. I thought the 500,000 predicted by the model was based on no actions being taken.
It was based on no action being taken but I don't know where the evidence for the figure exists? To be clear, I am very much in the I don't know if the lockdown did or din't help camp. I do think though the deaths from other illnesses that aren't being treated through fear of going anywhere will increase. I also think we can't live in a world where all risk is eliminated.
