Italy explains why we need mass testing. It has 521 patients per million, the highest of all.

[Maraya1969]

China only has 56 per million.

Italy has a 4% death rate and so does China at this point.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

As I was looking into this I Googled and found this CNN article that explains why Italy is so bad.

Why South Korea has so few coronavirus deaths while Italy has so many
Opinion by Kent Sepkowitz


https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/opinions/south-korea-italy-coronavirus-survivability-sepkowitz/index.html

(CNN)As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen, much attention in the US has been given to improving the availability of the diagnostic test.

Though testing is known to effectively reduce the risk of transmission, many experts are beginning to also associate more widespread testing with the statistic of greatest concern -- survival from the disease.

The connection seems straightforward. Consider two countries with large outbreaks.


In South Korea, the rate of testing has been quite high (3,692 tests per million people as of March 8), and its mortality among those infected quite low (about 0.6%, or 66 deaths, at last count).


By contrast, Italy tests about 826 people per million and its mortality among those with diagnosed infection is about 10 times higher, with more than 1,000 people dead from the disease.

EDIT: It is all a matter of getting the people who are infected out of the population and into isolation. Mass testing finds these people and removes them.

[hlthe2b]

1. 0.05%... Yikes

[Igel]

2. South Korea had few deaths

because of (1) mass testing--and (2) it really helped to know that it was primarily one town and one group in that town.

Otherwise they'd have tested not 100,000, but 10,000,000. And their system would have crashed. They might have had that many to test anyway, but (3) they started early and (4) with a lot of buy in that caused fairly stern measures to be accepted or even welcomed.

Italy lacked mass testing. It was not primarily in one town. They didn't start early--perhaps because of lack of mass testing of those not suspected to be carriers, perhaps because of incompetence, but the first reason is both true and sufficient, and they didn't have a lot of buy in to begin with.


(1) without (2-4) gets you a giant pile of tests and a huge amount of data, but not so much after that.

[Maraya1969]

3. It would be good to know where pockets are though through wide spread testing?

And I understand the CNN article is also speaking about other variables, such as the age of the citizens, (Italians are on average much older than Koreans) and smoking habits and the fact that men tend to die easier than women with this disease.

[Native]

4. I figured this out more than a week ago after reading articles from all over the globe, & people

thought I was being alarmist. Fell down and wasn’t well enough to do much else, so it was a deeper dive for info than I usually take.

[Meowmee]

5. According to this site

South korea has the highest per million after Bahrain, I am not sure if that has changed or not.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing

We are not all going to die. 80% of people don’t get seriously ill and they will then have some immunity.

[Maraya1969]

6. Maybe I'll go edit that. I was just being nutty for a moment.

[Meowmee]

8. Yes I saw all of it and it is bad

But no way are we all going to die

[Maraya1969]

7. Do you see how far down the US is in testing? We are like a third world nation.

[Meowmee]

9. Yep

They have blood on their hands once again.

[blitzen]

10. The main point of this, I think, is that the actual death rate is lower than current stats show...

which seems only to be expected: lots more people have it than reflected by the official "total cases" stats. I imagine the CDC will be doing random surveillance testing soon, to get an accurate estimate of the number of infected persons--and naturally the death rate will decrease.