Originally Posted by
bobbytables
With some estimates of minor/asymptomatic infection up around 80% of infected people it should be quite easy to understand how the case count can have little to do with the number of infected people, with the ratio between those numbers varying between countries not based on transparency but simply based on how much testing they’re doing, making comparing case counts between countries rather a pointless exercise.
Understood.
In my view, testing is important as a tool to surgically isolate individuals and certain clusters, but not as important as it relates to mortality and soft infrastructure disruption. HK/SG/TW have been dealing with this before we have, and could provide some helpful data. If their infection rates force such a dislocation of change where it becomes impossible to keep essential soft infrastructure functioning, we can hopefully learn from and potentially avoid a similar fate. On the other hand, if there is minimal or no disruption, then we may learn and try to adopt some of their countermeasures, to the extent possible. While infection rates are important, I'm more interested in mortality, since deaths will mostly be accounted for, unlike testing. Yes, I realize they can assume it's the flu, but we would notice a statistical anomaly with abnormally high flu mortality and may attribute that difference to the coronavirus.
At this point, I'm mostly concerned with mortality and avoiding the soft infrastructure collapse scenario, especially the latter since this will be an indication that this will all be manageable.