I keep seeing people say it has ~3% fatality. This is incorrect. You cannot look at the ratio between diagnosed cases and deaths for a couple reasons. Firstly, it takes time to die. This virus is spreading at an accelerating rate, today its nearly 300 more cases than yesterday, let us for sake of argument say it takes 3 days to die, you should be looking at the total cases 3 days ago. Additionally their healthcare systems are overwhelmed, do you think they are going to focus resources on diagnosing and treating living patients, or worrying about what the dead died of.
I am NOT an epidemiologist, but I’m a pretty smart guy, and I go by what I see. The actions of the Chinese government do not, to my eye, display an abundance of caution, or an attempt to reassure the public that it has the matter in hand. They reveal to me panic. At this time they alone know the full scope of this, unfortunately I think we may all know before long.
What you are missing is that the denominator is unknown and is probably huge.
All outbreak reporting starts with “worst first”. This will be no different.
3% of confirmed cases is meaningless when almost none of the cases are being counted.
The other thing we don’t know is how many are sick at home, unable to or afraid to go to the hospital. When they start burning homes...that’s a bad sign.