Fair point for sure - if you increase the denominator (# of people confirmed infected), you’ll lower the CFR.
That said, the WHO is still to the best of my knowledge (as of today) saying the CFR is ~3.4%. And S. Korea seems to be an outlier (although not sure why) - China is 3.8%, for example and IMHO gives us the most accurate #s given it’s most established over there, and there’s a lot more data over a longer period of time to analyze.
Worse, though, the number of infected needing serious hospitalization (up to and including intubation) is reported to be 15-20%. If that’s anywhere near accurate, it’ll collapse our healthcare system.
You may have seen the press that Italy’s healthcare system is already buckling under the strain of only 5,800 cases. They’re out of doctors and are asking retired doctors and nurses to come out of retirement to help. Imagine what will happen when the # needing hospitalization increase beyond what are relatively pretty small %s at this point in time..
I saw a good post here earlier this AM (can’t find at the moment) of an analysis shared on Twitter that essentially proves (again, via reasonable projections and hard data vs hyperbole) that the US health system could quite easily hit max capacity if not collapse outright sometime around July of this year. Guess we will see what happens..hopefully we’ll dodge that and get a handle on this thing long before that time.
i told you why south korea is an outlier.
Because they are testing drastically more than everyone else.
They actually have drive through testing.
There are far more people infected with coronavirus than people think. And the death rate is far, far lower than the estimate by WHO for the reasons i gave. It’s like you say, numerator vs denominator. If there are far more people infected than people think, the death rate is far lower than people think. Take a look in amazement at how few people have been tested, then you will realize what bunk the death rate estimate is. But it’s still dangerous for old people.
Lots of healthy people will get infected by coronavirus and not ever report in or get counted. Many of them might suspect they had something else. Remember the evacuation of US citizens from the cruise ship to anchorage? None of them on the flight had symptoms. On landing, tests revealed quite a number had it. But they had flown together, side by side. (duhhh!!!!)
How many disease vectors is that and what percent of US infections will result from it?
I am not dismissive of the potential of this virus to be terrible until may or june. The growth rate in Iran and Italy is bad right now. It probably is bad in a lot of other countries not reported and not tested.
It could overwhelm the health care system in places with too many old people requiring ventilator support. It could cause severe economic disruption with greater impacts abroad. A rare chance it mutates into something awful.