~90% of cases get a fever which is uncommon for a cold so if there were large amounts of people with the disease it would at least be showing as a huge spike of

~90% of cases get a fever which is uncommon for a cold so if there were large amounts of people with the disease it would at least be showing as a huge spike of people with the flu, plus we'd likely see a spike in deaths. It won't be mistaken for just a cold. The way it's playing out in Italy is that there were a lot of diagnosed cases early on but once the testing caught up they seem to be on the same exponential curve as everywhere else, but this was only high in percentage terms and low in raw numbers. There is definitely under reporting of cases (and some misdiagnosed deaths), but so far no reason to think it's a tip of an iceberg type of scenario and there are large masses of undiagnosed people. For calculating mortaility rates there's also the lag time between getting the virus and death to take into consideration. Going back to your original post about the fatality rate in WA, the numbers are simply too low to indicate anything at all. There are only 4 countries on Earth we can get much statistical significance from and of those Iran is the only one that lacks testing at the moment.