I don’t understand the 40 to 80% statistic considering that everyone I know is social distancing. Are you saying most of those people are already infected? And not showing symptoms? Can you cite that statistic please?  | 
							
						
 NP. I think the PP was posting her response to the prior posters downplaying of 0.2%.  | 
							
						
 Our social distancing is meant to delay the peak so our hospitals can cope, not to keep us from getting it. Here is the Times article on estimates of percentage of the population that will get it under different scenarios: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/20/us/coronavirus-model-us-outbreak.html  | 
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						In Italy there are over 4000 suicide deaths, increase of 12% due to the economic downturn.
 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/suicide-in-italy-its-an-e_b_10597478  | 
						
 That article is from 2016 and the 4K number is during the period of a year. Of course, recessions do cause deaths in a number of ways, including suicides. So you definitely have to focus on the health of the economy, not just how hospitals are doing. Its an impossible balance.  | 
| In the U.S. for 2018, there were 48,344 recorded suicides, up from 42,773 in 2014, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). On average, adjusted for age, the annual U.S. suicide rate increased 24% between 1999 and 2014, from 10.5 to 13.0 suicides per 100,000 people, the highest rate recorded in 28 years. I am sure we will surpass that this year due to this lock down and economic downturn. | 
						
 Or there will be fewer because even the Jones are doing poorly so people don’t feel as much pressure to keep up with them?  | 
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						An Italian Mayor ranted people were not exercising social distancing during lockdown.
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 No, more telling is to take all resolved cases, and compare deats to recovered. These tell you different tale.  | 
							
						
 This! It makes no sense to try to calculate a mortality rate from data that includes unresolved cases. This illness lasts for weeks. Are you really a data scientist, first PP?  | 
							
						
 Nah. Everything is relative. The rich will still have more than the poor people do. I don't think that ratio will change at all.  | 
							
						
 Especially now when CA NYC will test only few and in thewhole US tons of home recoverng never tested. Reolved are recrded tested deaths and recvered The only ACTUAL data.  | 
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						Sorry no. The point is that if you are computing the death rate from the cases that are tested/treated in hospitals you are not getting the real death rate of the disease. You are mixing together the effects of 1) getting only the worse cases to the hospital (there are LOTS of people who got the disease in the mild form and never even went to the hospital.., 2) your own hospital/country/... ability to get those on ventilator (there is a reason why China built three extra hospitals in Wuhan -- they needed the extra beds -- the triage happening in France/Italy is because they are lacking the beds and the ventilators). 
 This is what is called "a selection effect" -- You are measuring a sample which has been "selected" (only the worse...)-- For measuring the death rate of the disease, you will need to know the total number of people who actually had the virus, not just the number of people you tested and received in the hospital. So yes, you can compute a death rate from the recovered people but this is not a good indicator of the death rate of the disease itself -- That is why I say that the ratio of cured/treated is an OK proxy for the status of care in the county/hospital.... -- because it measures the number of the worst cases you were able to cure -- Both are linked because (cured+death=treated), and you could really use either one but again, you are not measuring the death rate of the disease itself. The only set-up in which this number is known is the cruise ship which was quarantined -- The entire population of the ship was tested and we know how many got infected and how many died -- but here, the numbers are difficult to extrapolate to the general population because of course, the cruise demographics are nothing like a reflection of the true composition of a country (or even a town). People can estimate how many people are believe to be infected (and one can do that with models) but these are still "educated guesses". This is also why there are so many conflicting opinions -- There are A LOT of unknowns in this situation. There is no need to go all hysteria about it. So far, this disease has killed a thousand times less than the seasonal flu. When all is over, I would vote to make statistics and probability mandatory classes from the K to 12.  | 
						
 If 100% of the US population gets it, that's 6 million deaths. If 80% get it (which is predicted as no one has immunity), that's 5.2 million deaths. No big deal.  | 
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						Statistics and probability IS in the K-12 curriculum. 
 Fear of dying is in the theology curriculum.  |