Italy has a 39% Closed Case Death Rate so far. See here:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
The correct statistic to follow is Deaths / Closed Cases, which I’ll call the Closed Case Death Rate. Closed Cases are composed of both “Deaths” and “Recovered / Discharged.” Neither the numerator or denominator contains people who are currently sick and may either die or recover in the future.
Like Italy, China had a high early Closed Case Death Rate, which declined dramatically to about 6%. Nobody trusts China’s numerator or denominator, but let’s say Italy follows the decline as quarantines work.
In the mean time, let’s not use the bad math of Deaths / Total Cases. In a situation where the Cases are expanding rapidly as they are in Italy, that’s a useless statistic. Many of the Active Cases will result in Death. The correct stat is Deaths / Closed Cases, which is extremely high now (39%), and will be worked down as effective measures (hopefully) kick in (6% more or less???).
Italy is a total standout among the infected countries. I have a lot of relatives there, luckily they are in the central-south and in tiny isolated villages.
But there’s something strange about how hard this is hitting Italy. I’m curious whether we will learn some day why...
Germany had over 1,000 reported cases before it had one death.
Austria, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and UK are similar, so far.
It’s fascinating.
“The correct statistic to follow is Deaths / Closed Cases”
Agreed, and globally using that metric the fatality rate is currently running around 7%. That’s the ratio to watch closely as global infection numbers increase. There needs to be an improvement in that ratio, otherwise in the end we’re dealing with a much higher fatality rate then what’s being reported.
When someone dies, that case is closed immediately, whereas someone who will ultimately survive can take weeks to be cleared...so the bias is a bit toward a higher death rate for those who are stricken with it severely enough to be hospitalized or to see a doc about it.
Just like flu, anyone not too sick is going to sleep, medicate and eat their way clear of the disease - those cases NEVER get reported...but they can be estimated.
We will have to wait for many months to get an accurate mortality rate for this disease from several Western (and some honest Eastern) nations. Then they have to be analyzed to get a death rate for each age group. This also assumes that the virus doesn’t mutate, because if it does, then we will be dealing with two (or more) different viruses and a single death rate will not be accurate.