On: Our model suggests that global deaths remain 5% ab...

[projektfu]

'The authors note that they included only patients who were hospitalized for SARS treatment. "If additional infections in the community do not lead to admission to hospital or death, the case fatality rate based on all infections would be lower," they state'

In other words, they didn't have much of a handle on what subclinical SARS-coronavirus case fatality rate was. I'm not sure if hospitalized COVID-19 patients recovered better or worse than SARS.

[lazide → projektfu]

SARS was definitely much worse than COVID, and less infectious. It also wasn't infectious without symptoms. That helped it be contained, and it never escaped containment for very long like COVID did. It is very unlikely there were a lot of uncaught infections (unlike COVID) due to those factors. Not impossible a few slipped through though, which is why they put that in the paper. If it had, the death toll would have been astronomical. It was closer to Ebola than the Flu, and that had similar limiting effects in spread - it couldn't fly under the radar long enough, and it scared people enough that they took it seriously.

With COVID, it could spread asymptomatically (and did), and it was never clearly fatal enough that EVERYONE took it seriously, which allowed it to spread easier.

Another huge part of it IMO was it took awhile to develop reliable tests. The PCR test had up to 50% false negative rate for infections depending on when during the infection the samples were taken, and took awhile to get results back.

Antibody tests didn't happen for a long time, so even retroactive knowledge was spotty, and antigen tests were a year+ out, and also had a relatively high false negative rate but at least were faster and more reliable (fewer false positives).

Since it was clearly infectious without major symptoms, and the symptoms were often so vague (cold and flu like unless it got really bad) it was really hard to figure out what was actually going on.