Coronavirus spreads. But don't panic! (topical thread)

[Deesse23]

Remember all those asymptomatic cases we were hearing about? Looks like they were largely the result of statistical effects and test defects. An antibody test that's accurate 99% of the time still throws more false positives than actual positives if only 0.1% of the population has been infected. Out of 1000 people you'd expect just 1 true positive but 10 false positives. A lot of those false positives have gone on to be reported as asymptomatic cases.

Asymptomatic and weakly symptomatic cases are occurring, just probably not at the high levels that some studies cited by the news suggest.

That, in return, means that the lethality is really in the x% range. Still a bit too scary for my taste.