I”m discussing this with several people, so let me review.
It was my take you were using the deaths against the number of cases documented.
If you’re using the formula below, I may have misunderstood.
deaths divide by deaths + recovered
I divided the confirmed deaths by the total confirmed cases, before they became deaths, which would be what you wrote, the numbers of those who died + the numbers diagnosed with the illness, but recovered. Getting the number of the whole population affected is a part of a good statistical analysis.