Among the many things that must be determined with this virus is what the mortality rate in each and every nation where it’s found. I’ve read 2% as the mortality rate. OK,perhaps it is 2% in China,a Third World cesspool that still depends on “barefoot doctors” (remember them from the 60s?).OTOH,it could be 0.2% in an advanced,civilzed nation like Japan,Britain or the US and the majority of those fatalities are in the elderly or those with compromised immune systems.
While I agree with most of what you are saying, even those samples are too small for a good assessment.
A cruise for instance, like the one in Japan, may have a higher number of people over 60. The virus seems to target that age group. How many people had cancer on that cruise? etc.
Like I said earlier. Flu numbers are fairly reliable because the data has been collected over decades.
As bad as that is, it's good news.
The rate of deaths/deaths+recoveries has been dropping pretty steadily since day one.
Better treatment, patients in better underlying health, mutation to less lethal forms, and maybe lower risk genetics, maybe?
The 2% number (which is 20 times the flu death rate!) is based on deaths/everyone who is sick!
The textbook formula for mortality is deaths/total cases. It works well for the Spanish Flu, the Black Death, or any other historical disease where all the cases have run their full course.
Applying it to everyone currently sick forces the assumption that NO ONE WHO IS NOW SICK WILL DIE!
That underestimates the actual net rate.
Tell you what. Let's calculate the survival rate.
Hmmmm. 30,311 recovered/81,245 confirmed infected, times 100 yields only 37.3% survive.
Do you buy that number?
Among the many things that must be determined with this virus is what the mortality rate in each and every nation where it’s found.
I’ve read 2% as the mortality rate.
Even with good math, it is probably too soon to tell what the actual figure is anywhere, as the time to die and the time to recover are different - which will inflate the death rate. At best we can determine now is rough bounds.
Outside of China, the death to recovered+dead percentage is currently over 10% and climbing.
All figures are extremely unreliable as we don’t have good sampling to determine how many actually are sick, we are less that 8 weeks (based upon official China) or about 3 weeks, into what appears to be an up to 6-week cycle from infected to recovered.
Some people are running around crazy and scare-mongering in at least partial hysteria. A lot of others are poo-pooing with flatly illogical comparisons. There are reasonable precautions to take well away from either extreme.