Anybody familiar with Barry Bloom? He's an old guy from Harvard that is considered a pioneer of infectious diseases, vaccines, and public health. Below is a link to a press conference he did Thursday. Pretty interesting overall. But he recognizes that what we have so far are models off of incomplete data. It seems fairly certain (to me at least) that the more people that get tested, the less catastrophic this disease will appear. Hopefully we can get more complete data asap to help make sensible policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. This is not a one size fits all problem as we can see from the maps Randy posted. Maybe this will happen before irreparable damage is done to our rights and our nation.
You’re listening to a press conference from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health featuring Barry Bloom, professor of immunology and infectious
www.hsph.harvard.edu
BARRY BLOOM: So, I may sound like a broken record that you’ve heard before. But the case fatality rate depends on two things, one of which is pretty easy to figure out, which is how many people die. In some places, it’s not always clear whether they die of this infection(COVID-19), or influenza, or something else. So, there’s a certain amount of uncertainty about just counting people who die in a given region in the middle of an epidemic.
The second, and much more difficult, is the rate depends on how many people of those infected actually die. And we have figures from China. And I think everyone would agree that not everybody was tested. So, we actually don’t know what the denominator is.
And the more people who get tested, usually, the lower the case fatality rate is.
So, if you remember H1N1 in Mexico, the initial reports– case fatality rate were 5% to 10%. And that was mostly because they were looking at people who were sick, very sick, and in hospitals. But as the epidemiology played out retrospectively and one tackled how many people had any medical problem that could be related to an infection with flu,
it went down to 0.07%.
So, the case fatality rate really depends on knowing the denominator. And without testing a very wide range of people, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, we tend always to get a higher number, which is the most frightening number. For the modeling studies, people that I’ve looked at–
I’m modeling at about 1%. And it may drop down quite dramatically if we actually knew how many people were infected and not sick at all.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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