Try looking at this from a new perspective. Deaths v Confirmed Survivors. Remove the several thousand still ill and not in either category from consideration.
Look at the end of the illness. Calculated from recent stats.
424 dead, 727 confirmed cleared = a 37% death rate. Hopefully the remaining 19,550 all survive and we can then say 2.2%.
This may be as bad or worse than quite a few are thinking.
Erick, your thoughts on this this analysis?
Nemo
Nemo, you bring up an excellent point that I was thinking about also:
Even thought the deathrate is low... but that is based on who has died SO FAR among 20,000 infected, many mahy others may yet still be waiting to die since they have NOT recovered..... perhaps even in great numbers.. And the prevalence of older folks , or immunocompromised folks among the dead may simply mean the young/healthy take longer to die.
This would certainly be a worst case interpretation .. but as yet still a plausible one..
Simply based on reported data that is..
There are to things that indicate to push the death rate up and down..;
a) the exact point you made 20,000 haven't recovered yet... the recovered folks vs the dead folks paints MUCH greater death rate as explained above....
but also b) Since we figure there are many many more infected than even the Chinese even know about.. it is conceivable a model pointing to a LOWER death rate as well.
Why? Because in a epidemic especially in the beginning (which is were are data is still mostly rooted in) the data self select for the most severe cases..(unless u r very ill u dont go to the hospital, or get admitted)
So we could have 200,000 more infected right now that are asymptomatic or so mild they dont bother to go to the hospital because they think its something else... since they associate 2019-nCorv with severe illness....
The bad part of this phenomenon is this.. it turbocharges the infection..... the good part it is an indicator for a much lower death rate.. because if we have really 200,000 infected the deaths.. even if they are only "as yet" deaths suddenly are a much lower %age.
So we have two "data models" so to speak in our "nowcasting" to interpret whats is really going on... they push in the opposite direction..
Again.. our low recovery rate compared to deaths suggests a much higher death rate than reported, while at the same time the widespread suspicion of huge additional numbers of Chinese citizens infected would support the opposite conclusion.
Which of these two factors is more dominant we will find out in the near future... but we have two plausible models that each suggest the opposite of each other.
I hope my explanation made sense.
PS: Another complication factor is this.... even if the death rate really is as low as we currently think (and it might be or not) this is achieved with treatments via ventilators to address ARDS.
If there are so many sick PPL a national medical system can run out of ventilators and then we will see a serious jump by orders of magnitude in deaths... or a grid down would case same.. so lots of competing models that are equally plausible... the good news is now that its in the West we should have better data soon.
