Ah, so including China, which is not reporting significant new cases and assuming you trust that, with the rest of the world implies a slowdown, because Chinas reported cases represent the significant majority of the total cases even still. They are a different parabola from the rest of the world.
Here are the figures for some of the last few days for the world outside of China and Iran:
. . . Cases. Dead. Recovered. Dead/Resolved. . . . .
4 Mar 12085,,181,,,670,,,,,,,,21%
5 Mar 13944,,227,,,818,,,,,,,,22%
8 Mar 22733,,511,,1239,,,,,,,,29%
Unfortunately, I didn’t start keeping the captured figures until last week, only some of the results. Since Tuesday before last, the dead/resolved has been holding at 14-15%, and then began creeping up to 20% last Tuesday. So, that does not imply at all what the thesis of this article suggests. It does confirm that China is not reporting many new cases, and if it is to be believed, it is roughly contained there. The rest of the world, not so much.
Now, some things to keep in mind, since in the early part of the outbreak, the fatality rate is overstated since it takes less time to die than it does to recover. Further, there is some unknown number of people who are sick, but not discovered. With the lack of test kits until recently, this unknown number may be larger in the US, especially than in South Korea or Italy, but do not appear to be hugely so as a ratio - certainly nowhere close to enough to suppose COVID-19 is on the order of a bad flu in regards lethality. If the Chinese have actually begun to report numbers reliably (which the article’s these firmly relies upon), then the numbers of cases which were unknown is relatively small. Do keep in mind that unlike the flu, where no real effort is made to track down the source of an infection, there has been a very vigorous effort to track down every single COVID case.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/#days
**Days from first symptom to death
The Wang et al. February 7 study published on JAMA found that the median time from first symptom to dyspnea was 5.0 days, to hospital admission was 7.0 days, and to ARDS was 8.0 days.[9]
Previously. the China National Health Commission reported the details of the first 17 deaths up to 24 pm 22 Jan 2020. A study of these cases found that the median days from first symptom to death were 14 (range 6-41) days, and tended to be shorter among people of 70 year old or above (11.5 [range 6-19] days) than those with ages below 70 year old (20 [range 10-41] days.[6]
**Median Hospital Stay
The JANA study found that, among those discharged alive, the median hospital stay was 10 days.[9] “
The faulty method of calculating mortality rate of dividing deaths by spread has been persistent, and even WHO has put out numbers based upon this ridiculous case of bad math.
Here is an good explanation of why deaths/cases is absurd:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/#correct
“The correct formula, therefore, would appear to be:
CFR = deaths at day.x / cases at day.x-{T}
(where T = average time period from case confirmation to death)
This would constitute a fair attempt to use values for cases and deaths belonging to the same group of patients.
One issue can be that of determining whether there is enough data to estimate T with any precision, but it is certainly not T = 0 (what is implicitly used when applying the formula current deaths / current cases to determine CFR during an ongoing outbreak). “
If you were to replace “Coronavirus” with “Ricin”, and inject 100 people with a dose which would kill 100% in a week, then every day double the number of people you give the injection, using the deaths/cases method, after one week you would have a fatality/injection ratio of 0.78% (100/12,700), for a 100% fatal toxin.
“If you were to replace “Coronavirus” with “Ricin”, and inject 100 people with a dose which would kill 100% in a week, then every day double the number of people you give the injection, using the deaths/cases method, after one week you would have a fatality/injection ratio of 0.78% (100/12,700), for a 100% fatal toxin.”
Well, OK then. If the coronavirus had a 100% fatal death rate, we would be screwed. Got it..
BTW, while we are getting some statistical smear, due to the geographical spread of the coronavirus, it appears (to me) that the fatality overstatement is probably in the range of a factor of 3.5-5.
MERS CFR was about 30%, SARS was about 10-12%, and COVID appeared as of last Friday to be in the 4-6% range. The flu is usually in the 0.1%-.04% range, we’ve had a couple of particularly bad outbreaks the past couple of years, with one outbreak at about 0.3% and this year about 70% more cases than usual.
As of a couple of weeks ago, the distribution of *both* the COVID-19 and the flu was that roughly 95% of the fatalities were in people over 50, which is not quite the same definition as “elderly”. About 25% of the COVID-19 fatalities are in their 50s and 60s.