Aside from an early evaluation and a small data set, these numbers do not make sense to me:
The average mortality rate in the US is:
Over age 85 is ~13.5%
75-84 is -4.4%
With Coronavirus in the US:
Over age 85 is ~10.4%
75-84 is ~4.3%
Even in China over age 80 was reported to be 14.8%. Not an enormous difference versus our non-Coronavirus population.

Younger ages are certainly much lower actual mortality rates versus the confirmed patients because the large number of unconfirmed cases (people just got better before tests were available) rendering them statistically unreliable in my opinion.

Here are US-related sources if interested:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/most-us-coronavirus-deaths-ages-65-older-cdc-report-2020-3%3famp

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/60896/cdc_60896_DS1.pdf

I think people heard what they wanted to hear and tried to extrapolate with unreliable and incomplete data against virus outbreak and exponential math theory and said this is going to be bad.

Cooler heads are starting to come to the forefront and ask real questions. And there aren't any real answers except this is going to be bad. So many just keep saying it.

Thank you!

By my numbers you have a lower mortality rate in the US if you have Coronavirus than if you avoid it. If so, why are we stuttering Main Street and plunging our economy into a recession?

Some folks will recover and die from something else this year. Some folks will die from this that would have died for another reason. Some folks might die of other reasons because the quality of their care decreased.

Put it all together and the end result of a largely unchecked outbreak would still likely be a lot more deaths than otherwise.

While we're still building a body of data, the mortality rate in the Lombardy region of Italy has been up roughly 80-%100 since the outbreak. The mortality rate for Italy as a whole has been up 20-25% since the outbreak.

So, is the OP saying if you are over 85, you have a 13% chance of dying in the next two weeks without corona virus?

bmart97 said:

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By my numbers you have a lower mortality rate in the US if you have Coronavirus than if you avoid it. If so, why are we stuttering Main Street and plunging our economy into a recession?

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No man those are not comparable statistics. The mortality rate, I am sure, is an annualized number of the entire population. The coronavirus death rate is a small subset against itself with no time table.

Whats the total mortality rate in a six week period?

Its apples to oranges

When you see a general mortality rate for 85 year olds, I assume that is an annual rate. The numbers you see that are being used to produce the Case Fatality rates indicate mortality taking place in a shorter time frame than a year. An expectation that 14% will die in the next year is different than expecting 14% to die in the next six weeks.

Also, the general mortality rate does not reflect the impact of the virus. It reflects previous years data. If enough 85 year olds succumb this year, the reported general mortality rate for this year might rise. Depends on who succumbs to Coronavirus? Are they the same that would have died in this calendar year anyway? That seems really unlikely to me.

Here's the math of it, maybe this will help.

Take a population of 1000 with an "inherent" mortality rate of 15%. Assume the COVID-19 mortality rate within the population is just 10%.

100 would die of COVID-19. If 15% of the remaining 900 dies of other causes, you've actually lost 235 people, which is a mortality rate of 23.5%.

If the inherent mortality rate is 13.5 percent, then you'd have an overall mortality rate of 22.5%. That's a 67% increase in deaths.


You can play around with the possibilities. Lets say the COVID-19 deaths are prejudiced towards folks who were more likely to die, such that the remaining 900 have an inherent rate of only 7.5%. You've actually lost 168 people, which is a mortality rate of 16.8%. That's maybe not so bad.

If you bump the COVID-19 rate to 15%, but keep 7.5% for the rest, you end up at a rate of about 21%.


Now, you're right. Not everyone will get infected. The break even point of the 15% and 7.5% numbers is right out about a 50% infection rate.

Quote:

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An expectation that 14% will die in the next year is different than expecting 14% to die in the next six weeks.

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Well, 14% of the total elderly population wouldn't die within the next six weeks from COVID-19 unless they all got infected in coming weeks. So, that's problematic depending on infection rates.

But, this does still help make the point that a high infection rate would really blow up the mortality rates. (Which has been the Italian experience.)

AustinAg2K said:

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So, is the OP saying if you are over 85, you have a 13% chance of dying in the next two weeks without corona virus?

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No, he's saying that within a given year, people over the age of 85 have a 13% chance of dying in that year, which is greater than the chance of an 85 year old dying of Corona.

By the way, flu and other infection numbers will hopefully be down this year.

One thing I might add is that the Diamond Princess (Wuhan to Japan) was a one month float at sea in perfect Petri dish conditions for a population group closer to the age group we're discussing with an infection rate of 17% and death rate of those infected of 0.9% for the general population and 7.3% for those over age 70. While it may not be a perfect lab experiment, 3711 is a reasonable sample size where interactions with people who share the same hand rails, elevators & dining facilities have to approach city-like conditions. Every individual was quarantined & tested. Lastly, this was early on without the benefit of the best treatment options available today is my guess. Seems that this was about as pure a study as possible.

That being said, I cannot understand what's happening in Italy.

Thank you for helping think through those numbers.

I'm going to apply your model using Diamond Princess numbers. So, 170 are infected and 12 die. The remaining 830 pass at a 4.4 rate, 37 die. Let's assume that the remaining 158 infected still pass at a 4.4 rate, another 7. So a total of 56 of 1000 pass this year from Coronavirus and normal causes. The mortality rate rose from 4.4% to 5.6% in let's call it the 70-85 age range (problems with different age ranges in the data).

I guess I don't see I don't see enough of an increase to justify the extent of the response. If it ends up that we have a mortality rate closer to Italy's, I understand the action. But, the numbers I just ran aren't enough to justify the damage done to the economy which will also have affect on the health and well-being of the population.

bmart97 said:

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One thing I might add is that the Diamond Princess (Wuhan to Japan) was a one month float at sea in perfect Petri dish conditions for a population group closer to the age group we're discussing with an infection rate of 17% and death rate of those infected of 0.9% for the general population and 7.3% for those over age 70. While it may not be a perfect lab experiment, 3711 is a reasonable sample size where interactions with people who share the same hand rails, elevators & dining facilities have to approach city-like conditions. Every individual was quarantined & tested. Lastly, this was early on without the benefit of the best treatment options available today is my guess. Seems that this was about as pure a study as possible.

That being said, I cannot understand what's happening in Italy.

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As mentioned in other threads, the geneticists may sort that out someday and find that a bit of it (not all) is a result of DNA makeup/tendencies vs. other makeups (Germanic/Scandinavian/etc).

The death rate always runs high at the beginning because it takes a lot longer to be declared "recovered" than it does to die.

That said, you have a lot of people going nuts with "numbers," many of whom have zero experience in any medical field or mathematics/statistics, and some who have their own personal agenda to predict doomsday.

No man. Still not how the numbers work

Be careful posting something other than doom and gloom on here!!!