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Yes, if you google "coronavirus iceland" you'll see they've tested almost their entire population. They found 1586 confirmed cases, of whom only 6 died, which gives a fatality rate of 0.4%.

Turning this around, if we multiply confirmed deaths by 264, that gives us an estimate of how many cases there are. So, for example, with UK's death count of 6159 this means about 2.4% of the population is infected. Furthermore, on the Diamond Princess only 20% of the people onboard caught the virus under poorly quarantined conditions. So, to extrapolate even further, this would imply that over 12% of the UK population has already been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. This means that the UK should peak at about 50k deaths, without any protective measures.

In 2018, the UK had 50k deaths due to flu in excess of normal flu deaths.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/30/winter-deaths-hi...



Iceland has only tested 28,992 of its residents as April 6th, so that throws the rest of this conjecture out the window. (Although regardless the conjecture was probably not a great idea.)

https://covid.is/data


The point is Iceland has the best statistic on death rate due to comprehensive testing.


I think the real point is that your original claim was a small sample that you were extrapolating wildly from turns out to be 10x smaller than you claimed.

Furthermore you are focusing on a tiny portion of available data instead of all that is available.

Given that New York State has 4,000+ deaths your "model" would indicate that 1MM residents have COVID-19? So if it rips through the remaining 19MM residents in the course of a few weeks the result will only be 80k deaths? And of course the healthcare system won't break down?

Also you said that the Diamond Princess only had a 20% infection rate but the Greg Mortimer is reporting a 60% infection rate. Seems like you've got a lot of facts wrong on the first pass, IDK.


It seems that 'all available' would diminish the signal of Iceland's good stat. What we really want is 'all good stats'. I think only South Korea is the other country with extensive testing.

According to my model NYC should only have a max of 13.5k deaths, without any mitigation.

Based on the Greg Mortimer stat, this bumps up to 41k for NYC.


It doesn't seem to pass just a basic level of consistency with present experience to believe that with no mitigation New York would only have 13.5k deaths when they already have 5.5k+ (and we know many more that have not and maybe will never be confirmed).

Even the idea of 41k at this point beggars belief, they are already well over capacity with some mitigation and the bodies are literally piling up.

I find it hard to wrap my head around the logic here.


My thought is since this is a new virus it will spread faster, and hit peak sooner. Also, those who are most affected are a small portion of the whole population, which will again imply faster time to peak.


> I think only South Korea is the other country with extensive testing.

South Korea has tested a tiny fraction of their total population, because the testing is largely targeted via contact tracing.


It isn't about proportion of population, but whether they are only testing people already admitted at the hospital, which will drive the estimate up, or testing the wider population, driving the estimate down. SK is doing the latter through contact tracing.


Iceland may have the best statistic on their death rate from this virus, but these things are not static and depend on a zillion factors (slight exaggeration).


It is close to the other country with a lot of testing, South Korea.


From your own link: "The failings contributed to the worst flu season for seven years, with 15,000 deaths from the virus, around twice the average figure, and the worst NHS performance on record."

Not 50,000.


Sorry, I misread. This doc says (look at last couple pages) the 2014/2015 and 2017/2018 seasons had over 25k deaths from flu.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

So my calculation shows cov2 is about twice as bad as a strong flu, with no preventative measures. If we hit the 20k or less with preventative measures that the Imperial model predicts, this will be on par with regular flu season.

At any rate, much less than the 200k+ deaths originally predicted by the Imperial model and that pushed the UK to lockdown.


Bergamo had an 0.4% of it's population die in excess of usual in March and no one believes that 100% of the population was infected. Which would put the UK at 240,000.





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