Many of these facts (in particular the reason that 100 million plus dead is effectively ruled out) have multiple explanations. For one, the earliest data on coronavirus implied the hospitalization rate was 10-20% for all age groups, and we now know it is substantially lower (that tweet by an author of the Imperial College paper, which estimated a hospitalization rate of 4.4%). This means that if hospitals were entirely unable to cope with the number of patients, the IFR would be in the range of 2%, not 20% initially implied.
Back in a previous Age of The Earth, also known as early March 2020, the most important thing in the world was to figure out the coronavirus hospitalization rate, and we overestimated it. See e.g.
Suppose 50% of the UK (33 million people) get the virus of which 5% (~ 1.8 million people) will need serious hospitalization [conservative estimate].
It’s mostly of academic interest now, since (at least in Europe) genuine exponential spread is looking more and more like the exception rather than the rule, but considering how much time we spent discussing this issue I’d like to know the final answer for completeness’ sake. It looks like even ‘conservative’ estimates of the hospitalization rates were too high by a factor of at least 2, just as claimed by the author of that imperial paper.
Here’s a crude estimate: the latest UK serology survey says 6.2% of people were infected by July 26th. Another says 7.1% were infected by July 30. The level of infection is so low in the UK right now that you’ll only get movement by a few tenths of a percentage point over the couple of weeks between then and now.
The false negative rate is unclear but I’ve heard claims as high as a third, so the real number may be as high as 9.3% based on the overall infection survey. Covid19pro estimated that on July 26th 8.6% (13.3-5.1%) had been infected. That 8.6% number seems to correspond to a reasonable false negative rate on the antibody tests (28% if you believe the first study, ~17% if you believe the second survey).
In other words, the median estimates from covid19pro look reasonably consistent with the antibody tests, implying a false negative rate of about 15-30%, so I’m just going to assume they’re roughly accurate.
We know from the ONS that the total number of patients ever admitted to hospital with coronavirus on July 22nd was 131,412. That number is probably pretty close to accurate—even during the worst of the epidemic the UK was testing more or less every hospital patient with coronavirus symptoms. The estimated number of people ever infected on July 22nd by c19pro was 5751036
So, two months have gone by. My main conclusions look mostly unchanged, except that I wasn’t expecting such a monotonically stable control system effect in the US. Vaccine news looks better than I expected, superforecasters are optimistic. The major issue in countries with moderate to good state capacity is preventing a winter second wave and managing small infection spikes. Rob Wiblin seems to buy in to the MNM effect.
Whatever happened to the Hospitalization Rate?
Back in a previous Age of The Earth, also known as early March 2020, the most important thing in the world was to figure out the coronavirus hospitalization rate, and we overestimated it. See e.g.
It’s mostly of academic interest now, since (at least in Europe) genuine exponential spread is looking more and more like the exception rather than the rule, but considering how much time we spent discussing this issue I’d like to know the final answer for completeness’ sake. It looks like even ‘conservative’ estimates of the hospitalization rates were too high by a factor of at least 2, just as claimed by the author of that imperial paper.
Here’s a crude estimate: the latest UK serology survey says 6.2% of people were infected by July 26th. Another says 7.1% were infected by July 30. The level of infection is so low in the UK right now that you’ll only get movement by a few tenths of a percentage point over the couple of weeks between then and now.
The false negative rate is unclear but I’ve heard claims as high as a third, so the real number may be as high as 9.3% based on the overall infection survey. Covid19pro estimated that on July 26th 8.6% (13.3-5.1%) had been infected. That 8.6% number seems to correspond to a reasonable false negative rate on the antibody tests (28% if you believe the first study, ~17% if you believe the second survey).
In other words, the median estimates from covid19pro look reasonably consistent with the antibody tests, implying a false negative rate of about 15-30%, so I’m just going to assume they’re roughly accurate.
We know from the ONS that the total number of patients ever admitted to hospital with coronavirus on July 22nd was 131,412. That number is probably pretty close to accurate—even during the worst of the epidemic the UK was testing more or less every hospital patient with coronavirus symptoms. The estimated number of people ever infected on July 22nd by c19pro was 5751036
So, 131412⁄5751036 = 2.3% hospitalization rate