Quote:
Originally Posted by G0HZU_JMR
... At the time of publication of the second report 11 of the 99 had died and half of the deaths appeared to be for those aged 61 years or under ...
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One of us must have mis-read the second paper. In the last paragraph on p5 they begin by discussing two patients individually of whom they say:
The first two deaths were a 61-year-old man (patient 1) and a 69-year-old man (patient 2) ...
Then in the same para, which has now run over onto p6 they say:
... Of the remaining nine patients who died, ... five were older than 60 years ...
So I make that seven of the eleven dead (64%) being older than 60 years and only four out of the eleven (36%) being under 60 years.
Interestlingly the paper also gives us the age breakdown of all of the patients (living and dead). 37 were over 60 and seven of those died, which is a death rate of 19% for the older people. 62 were under 60 and four of those died, which is a death rate of 6%. One of the hardest things in flu studies is accounting for all the people who were so lightly affected that they didn't bother to go to a doctor or hospital. They just went to bed for a few days, toughed it out and recovered. Unsurprisingly they tend to come from the less vulnerable groups in the population i.e. the young and healthy. So it could well be that this paper has missed a load of young people who got the disease but didn't die. If that's happened then it would push the overall death rate in the under 60 group even further down than the 6% that we see above.
Cheers,
GJ