Mar 1st 2020, 22:57:45
What the hell does that have to do with the coronavirus tho?
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It's interesting they are now saying they have overestimated the Case Fatality Ratio(CFR) by a factor 2-3. If true it is still significantly deadlier than the seasonal flu. This is natural as they are finding an ever increasing portion of the infected people, while early on in China they found only the worst cases, which were more likely to die. I guess a greater public understanding that they need to get tested fast and a greater breadth of knowledge around how to treat the sick helps too. So its only natural that the CFR drops.
But one thing I have not yet heard mentioned, which could be a contributing factor to reducing the CFR as this disease spreads, is that the worst cases usually are a result of more dangerous strains of the virus (mutations if you will) and since they are more likely to be caught fast by the health care systems active in fighting this, our interventions actually favor the milder strains.
The opposite was true for the spanish flu, which was a contributing factor for why it killed so many; the easy version is that there were two strains of the spanish flu going round, one severe and one mild. But because WW I was going on at the time the soldiers in the trench war on both fronts were quite isolated from the world, so when they got sick they mostly spread the disease among each others. They were pretty much quarantined. But when they got really sick they were taken out of there and back to the front hospitals and were free to spread the worst of the strains to nurses, doctors, logistics people and through them back into society as a whole.
Getting the mild strain of the virus, which was around as deadly as the seasonal flu, made most of the survivors immune to the more severe strain. So some areas were affected by the mild strain first and developed enough immunity so that the deadly strain, when that wave hit, didn't take hold in the population.
This virus seemed to start relatively deadly but because we are effective in combating it in 2020 we quickly identify the severe cases and the virus while the milder cases, which are usually from milder strains is a little harder to combat.
That is why the situation in Iran is so troubleing, same with many other poorer countries with weak health care or and/or civil unrest. If the virus takes hold in those places it can potentially create greater risks for all of us even if the situation right now seems to be under control or getting there in most affected modern societies.