@David Brosnan: I’m serious David. I’m a statistician and this is what the data are saying. The same data are also implying that the majority of the Italian population are infected and that is why we are seeing so many deaths there over the past week. They predict an eventual death toll in Italy of 1280 i.e. 0.002% of the 60.48 million Italians. The current death toll there is 1016 but it is flattening out just like in Korea. What we have is a highly contagious virus that causes relatively mild symptoms or no symptoms in the vast majority of the population.

@Trish O’Leary-Dunne: Hi Trish, So do I. Making predictions based on rapidly changing data can be very difficult but this South Korean database provides the best estimate for point prevalence I could find in any country. I think we should follow the advice from govt advisors re social distancing and washing hands as best we can. We can slow down the transmission and so avoid large numbers turning up at AE with symptoms and over burdening the system. That’s why I mentioned in a previous post about those returning from Cheltenham to consider self-isolation for 2 weeks. That would be really helpful in my view. But still the worst this data are predicting at the moment is 100 deaths in Ireland assuming most of us get infected eventually.

@Jacko Logan: I’ve read everything you said there, I look at all the comments on all these articles and this really stood out to me, how confident are you about this, can you give a percentage ? Thanks

@Jacko Logan: how confident are you on these numbers ? Can you give me a percentage, found this very interesting ? Thanks

@John O’Neill:

@John O’Neill:

I sourced the raw data from two links which it’s not letting me post. Google worldometers coronavirus and you should be able to navigate to the raw data deaths, testing etc.. from each country

The prevalence estimate of 7% uses the testing data and the mortality estimate uses the death count.

Note that 0.002 percent represents about 20 deaths per million people infected. Hence taking a worst case where all 5 million of us become infected we can expect around 100 deaths altogether.

@Jacko Logan: provide sources for all you have said.

@Jacko Logan: The Italian death toll is already 1266. It’s not going to stop at 1280, which is the 0.002% you’re talking about it. I agree with you that there are a lot more cases than are being reported, and that there are mild enough to lower the mortality % below 1 or 2%, but there’s no way it’s going to be as low as 0.002%

@C M: the numbers won’t be an exact translation. Just done a quick search on google there myself. The median age in 2020 in South Korea is approx 43 while in Italy its over 47. Also 2019 stats show that approx 14% of South Korea’s population is over 65 compared to approx 22% in Italy. As COVID-19 is more deadly in the elderly, you would expect to see a higher fatality rate in Italy compared to South Korea.

@Barry Sutton: I’ve just rerun the calculations on latest South Korean data. Using the links above, as of 9th March they had run 210144 tests yielding 7500 cases, a prevalence of 3.6%. Translating to the population of 51.5 million yields an estimate of 1.86 million cases. The death count as of today is 71. This gives a refreshed estimate of 0.0038%, or 38 deaths per million cases. This translates to an Irish death count of 190. But that’s assuming a worst case scenario that we all get infected. Hopefully the measures we are taking re hand washing and social distancing will reduce the transmission and we will end up with a much reduced death count.

@Jacko Logan: South Korea had hundreds of people tracking down and isolating contaminated contacts and disinfecting footpaths. North Korea terminated a politician to control quarantine. Any country that experienced sars locked down immediately. Schools are closed here but they meet in the park in gangs. Lockdown, social distancing is not being taken seriously. If we can stop the spread without martial law then it would help stop the peak of cases about to become known. As symptoms lag by 10 days our true cases will be increasing for next ten days and will drop if social distancing was successful. That will be the bases for our calcs for hospital admissions and ultimately deaths. South Korea
hospitals were not overwhelmed. We are closer to Italy in stats than South Korea.

@Jacko Logan: Google Tomas pueyo’s paper. Review and comment. The exponential curve needs to be stopped.

@Jacko Logan: hold your horses buddy. You may be a statistician but you have made a whole lot of false assumptions there. Currently 8000 cases approx. 72 deaths. 7300 active cases with an unknown outcome so far! The tested people who were clear may not yet have been exposed! Your projections are way off the mark. Leave it to the experts.

@Jacko Logan:
Current Italian death toll over 1800. You are pulling figures out of your @rse