Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Well that's...concerning.

Very very interesting and terrifying.

Some of that is good, but some is nonsense

Interesting, but:

But something interesting happened early on. The death rate was through the roof. At some point, the state had 3 cases and one death.

We know from other places that the death rate of the coronavirus is anything between 0.5% and 5% (more on that later). How could the death rate be 33%?

It turned out that the virus had been spreading undetected for weeks. It’s not like there were only 3 cases. It’s that authorities only knew about 3, and one of them was dead because the more serious the condition, the more likely somebody is to be tested.

Incredibly flawed logic. If one person enters the lottery and wins, that doesn't mean that there are 1 million other undetected players. It's likely that there are other players, but you don't know whether it's just random good luck for that one individual unless you have some idea of your detection rate. This is quite a fundamental statistical assumption that underlies everything else he is saying

I've seen a lot of posts on medium along this vein. I normally have a quick google of the author to see what their level of expertise is. I'd be expecting healthcare professional, phd, that kind of thing.

Almost always though they're about as qualified as I am (or often less so) to comment on something like this. This one is a Growth, Product and Marketing leader at Course Hero for instance.