How the the hell are we supposed to solve big, dangerous, existential problems when we're a bunch of frail, scaredy cats who whimper at a 1% death causing coronavirus?
It's funny that you should mention these things.
I think the chances of us successfully doing those things are vanishingly small if we can't get it together enough to simply make a few hundred million tests and hire a few hundred thousand contact tracers, redirect the resources of the nation towards eliminating the virus, and make this problem go away.
It's clearly something we
could do. There's no reason we need to have a shut down economy at this point (we've had three and a half months to solve the problem!)
We need to open up the economy, ASAP. Let's get that testing and tracing done
now, so we can actually move forward without discovering that we've turned it into a giant s*** sandwich, and we are all going to have to take a bite.
All the concerns about the economy and the impact of that have been valid from day one of social distancing. We did it so we could quickly build up capacity to crush the virus (just like all the other countries did). There's not much point in doing so if you twiddle your thumbs. But that's in the past. We're close (only need a factor of 10 more tests or so to get to something approximating normal), so let's finish the job.
For sure, I see no hope for addressing climate change anymore. If we can't agree on the approximate number of people a virus kills (like, getting it right to the correct order of magnitude), I don't see how we can possibly agree that climate change is something that needs to be fixed. I mean, it's a hoax, right?
The ~0.1% of people infected between 30 and 60 who die (about one quarter of whom were perfectly healthy) will also be removed from future mortality statistics.
EDIT: Corrected my statistics, which were from memory, and overly pessimistic. These numbers are based on IFR numbers from Spain, which seem slightly low to me, but may prove to be correct (we will see).
What I bolded and underlined is just simply fake.
I've corrected the statement to reflect the approximate Spanish numbers, and expanded the age range to 30-59. This results in about 0.073%, which I've rounded to 0.1%.
It was bothering me that I was so far off on this data. For sure, I made the mistake that I should have quoted the 40-59 age range (that's the bracket where I had calculated 0.4% in the past). But even after doing that for the Spanish data, it still only comes to 0.073% (per your table), as you pointed out. That seemed odd to me.
So I looked at NY State. One piece of info that is missing: I do not know the number of cases for each age bracket in NY State (didn't seem to be on their site). So, I used the NY City data to estimate the attack rate in the 40-59 bracket, and it looks like the attack rate in that bracket is very similar to the overall population attack rate (attack rate in older groups seems higher, and in younger groups it is lower).
Other data needed:
40-59: 27% of the population of NY State (and basically the same as NY City, where it is 26%)
Deaths in 40-59 age bracket, NY State: 2942
Cases in NY State, about 2 weeks ago (accounting for death lag): About 2.5 million, 12.9% of the population of 19.4 million. From COVID-19 Projections but also agrees with serology pretty well I think.
So, people in 40-59 bracket: 0.27*19.4e6 = 5.24 million
Infections: 0.129*5.24 million = 676k
Deaths: 2942
IFR (40-59): 0.44%
That's the number I was remembering. Still seems to be the same 0.4% I quoted originally.
Let me know if I've made (another) mistake here.
I was not sure why the table you posted with the Spain "data" results in a number that is so much lower (0.1%). So I looked at that:
https://www.mscbs.gob.es/gabinetePrensa/notaPrensa/pdf/13.05130520204528614.pdf
Using this, with the lag in deaths, I'm just going to assume deaths NOW reasonably represent the serology prevalence from April 27th to May 11th. Seems pretty reasonable.
From this link, we know:
Seroprevalence was about 5.7% in this bracket of 40-59.
From the current death data:
https://www.mscbs.gob.es/en/profesi...ina/documentos/Actualizacion_106_COVID-19.pdf
1) 27459 deaths
2) ~4.2% were between 40 and 59 (1153)
The % of the population of Spain which is 40-59 is about 32%.
Population of Spain is 47 million.
Infections: 0.32*47e6*0.057 = 857k cases
Deaths: 1153
So that is 0.13% (doesn't match your table, but is still much lower than NY).
Anyway, your table seems a bit low (wrong?), but I do wonder how good a job Spain has done of counting their deaths. Or, the seroprevalence numbers are a bit too high. I can't explain why this age group would have such different mortality than NY state. I expect some difference but it seems to be a factor of 3.
