Jeremy Vine today "1% of people with coronavirus will die"

[ChicChicChicChiclana]

Where did he get this figure from?

It is not a figure that is completely accurate but it about what most scientists and doctors are estimating, always with the caveat that we don't know exactly because whilst we know reasonably accurately how many people are dying of this, we don't know how many people have caught the illness in total.

www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30245-0/fulltext

This lancet article suggest that most experts think it may be around 1-2% of symptomatic cases .

That’s the generally accepted estimated mortality rate isn’t it?

It’s still a frightening number when applied to populations. If the U.K. is approximately 66 million people that’s 660,000.

If the whole of the population is exposed to the virus only a certain percentage will go on to develop symptoms and all of that percentage a much smaller percentage will die.
We are not talking 1% of the whole population we are talking 1% (or whatever the percentage is) of people who after exposure go on to develop symptoms

1% is best case, if the health service doesn't get overwhelmed.
If it does get swamped... 3.4% is the figure for Wuhan.

This is what I find so frustrating. The figures are not explained properly.

Surely he meant to say "In the UK, 1% of those who have been tested for coronavirus and the test was confirmed positive, have died or are expected to die"

Is he completely discounting the huge number of people who have had it without needing hospital treatment? And the 20% who have had it and didn't even realise because they are asymptomatic?

What do you mean by 3.4% in Wuhan @PeterWeg?

Are we UYScuti? 1% of people who get it will die?

Didn't I see estimated 60% of the population will get it?

66 million x 60% = 39,600,000.

1% of that is 396,000.

Is that what we should be expecting? If so, why are people talking about relaxing the lock down in a few weeks when the number of deaths in the UK has only reached 7,000 (I say "only" 7,000 but you know what I mean).

"In the UK, 1% of those who have been tested for coronavirus and the test was confirmed positive, have died or are expected to die.”

Of course he can’t say that. In the U.K. 11.6% of people who have tested positive have died. They are assuming that there are very large numbers of unconfirmed cases to bring the number down to around 1%.

The 1% estimate for death is an estimate that takes account of the expected number of undiagnosed cases.

Didn't I see estimated 60% of the population will get it?

Only if we didn't lockdown to reduce the transmission rate.

I thought the lock down was to slow down the infection rate. There isn't anything that can be done to reduce it.

There is. If you can get the R0 number below 1 then the epidemic will peter out.

Take no notice! He isn't a scientist, this is just his 'opinion'. No-one knows at the moment.

But the only way to bring the R0 down below 1 is to maintain lockdown. Remove lockdown and it will go up again...

I thought the lock down was to slow down the infection rate. There isn't anything that can be done to reduce it.

If we slow it down enough there will still be a lot of people un infected by the time a vaccine comes.

Not necessarily. If you have a good regime of testing, contact tracing and quarantine then you can get a handle on new cases. For that to work you need the lockdown to bring cases way way down. Then, once you’ve got a handle on the epidemic, mass testing, and isolation of known cases and for the wider population social distancing and mask wearing should be able to keep the R0 low.

If you have a good regime of testing, contact tracing and quarantine then you can get a handle on new cases.

We are so fucked!

We’re in lockdown at the moment, so don’t need it in place right now. If we can ramp up testing enough by the time lockdown ends then we might just get it under control. I don’t think it’s inevitable that it will spiral out of control.

Also the NORMAL annual death rate in the UK is between 580000 and 650000 people a year - about 1500/1600 people a day.

So the key question is how many of the COVID 19 deaths are occurring in people who would have died within the next couple of months in any case.

1% of people who get it is the standard figure people seem to use. Not 1% of the population or of those officially diagnosed.

It's just a ball park figure but seems pretty accurate.

All the stats seem pretty skewed and pointless - many (probably the majority) people with Coronavirus have not and will not be tested in this country, so we have no real or even vaguely accurate information to be able to put things into percentages.

I presume @PeterWeg means that there’s a higher death rate if people can’t get treatment.

Statistician999 Figures from Spain suggest that the number of excess deaths far exceeds the official death toll. It’s pretty sobering.

elpais.com/sociedad/2020-03-27/el-coronavirus-causa-mas-muertes-de-las-detectadas.html

It’s in Spanish but I ran it through a translator.

MyOtherProfile - so if the best rough guestimate is 1% of the people who get it, and we assume 60% of people in this country will get it (I seem to remember this is what we were told at the start) then that means 396,000 deaths in the UK. So why are we even talking about curve flattening and potential peaks and the like. I am not an unintelligent person but I find the statistics and the facts and figures so hard to get my head round.

Because without curve flattening, far more people will die because there will be no hospital beds and no ventilators.

If we can keep the numbers below the limits for the various hospitals, some people will die despite the best possible care. If we don’t, people will be denied care (no ventilators and possibly no hospital treatment) and a far greater percentage will die.

Flattening the peak is to slow down the rate of people getting it, in the main.
If we didn’t do anything, 60% of the population would get it in the next few months. Imagine the number of people in hospital? Those who could be saved wouldn’t be, as there wouldn’t be capacity to treat them.
If the curve is flattened and those people get it over the next 18 months, for example, hospitals will have more capacity to treat and less people die.