The death rate is not being overrated as half of those contracted are dead. (known cases)
I disagree. Consider the following statement by Dick Thompson, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO).:
'Relatives of avian flu patients have asymptomatic cases"
by Robert Roos. CIDRAP News. March 9, 2005:
"...thousands of mild and asymptomatic cases are going undetected as detailed by Dick Thompson, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO).
In an interview granted to CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) News on March 9, 2005, Thompson said that the case-fatality rate had been overstated.
Documented cases were those where the patients were sick enough to seek medical care in a hospital and, predictably, they had very poor outcomes. He concluded:
“Surely others were infected and either not getting sick or not getting sick enough to seek treatment at a hospital. Factoring those into the CFR [case-fatality rate] has been impossible. We simply don't know the denominator.”[2]
To illustrate, if 62 people died, but 10,000 had actually been infected, the death rate would be 0.62 percent, essentially insignificant. Therefore, without knowing how many are infected, the death rate is being highly inflated.
the mortality rate is inflated, according to Dick Thompson, ) infectious disease spokesman for the World Health Organization):
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/mar0905asymp.html
"The CFR [case-fatality rate] had to be overstated. The cases we were sure of were those which were sick enough to go to a hospital and these extreme cases have very poor outcomes. Surely others were infected and either not getting sick or not getting sick enough to seek treatment at a hospital. Factoring those into the CFR has been impossible. We simply don't know the denominator." [~Dick Thompson,WHO]
Dr. Arlene King of the Public Health Agency of Canada told CIDRAP News that researchers in Asia have conducted serologic surveys in an effort to find asymptomatic cases, but full results have not been released yet. In a newspaper report yesterday, she said, the WHO's Peter Horby reported that a serologic survey of Asian healthcare workers who had cared for avian flu patients found no evidence of infection among the workers. King is director of the agency's Immunization and Respiratory Infections Division in Ottawa...."