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South Korea's fatality rate will be somewhere between "deaths / confirmed cases" (currently around 0.7%) and "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" (currently around
by tunesmith 7y ago
South Korea's fatality rate will be somewhere between "deaths / confirmed cases" (currently around 0.7%) and "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" (currently around 28.5%) - those numbers will eventually converge.
What really matters though is to keep the raw number of confirmed cases low enough so that hospitals don't get overwhelmed. If hospitals get overwhelmed, fatality rates go up. So containment is key.
- FartyMcFarter 7y agoHow about "deaths / actual cases"? This number would be smaller than both of the ones you mentioned, unless you think that somehow all actual cases are detected.
- tunesmith 7y agoYes, that's true - although I would expect that countries with widespread easy testing would have their "confirmed cases" number get pretty close to the "actual cases" number. And "actual cases" would be the people that have the actual disease, not the people that just carry the virus. For people who are carriers but are not infected, they apparently don't want to mix those people into the numbers because that's not how other illnesses are counted either.
- edraferi 7y ago> What really matters though is to keep the raw number of confirmed cases low Sure, as long as you mean "actually slow the spread of infections through responsible personal and social choices" and not "sandbag the numbers because it looks bad for you politically."
- tunesmith 7y agoOf course, because the latter doesn't protect the hospitals from getting overwhelmed.