4 ms·
>> Their mortality numbers looked to be about 0.6% early on, but eventually hit 2% a month after the peak with people spending weeks in critical condition. I s
by w0utert 6y ago
>> Their mortality numbers looked to be about 0.6% early on, but eventually hit 2% a month after the peak with people spending weeks in critical condition.
I see this repeated often but this is a misrepresentation of the statistics. Case fatality rate (CFR) is not the same as mortality rate. The CFR is the ratio between deaths and confirmed cases, mortality rate is the ratio between deaths and total number of people infected. The former number is 2% in South Korea now, the latter can not be measured directly without testing 100% of the population continually during the entire timespan of the outbreak, but it is (practically speaking) by definition significantly lower than 2%, unless there is a huge number of unaccounted Covid-19 deaths, which is very unlikely.
- dh37 6y agoAgreed, although a nitpick: I think what you call "mortality rate" is called "infection mortality rate". (Totally agree with your important point that IFR < CFR.)
- Retric 6y agoMortality rate is population and cause specific. So CFR is a mortality rate, though different than the overall diseases mortality rate. That said, your definition is also in common usage and less ambiguous.
- w0utert 6y agoI think it’s fair to assume most people are mostly interested in statistics that give an indication of the likelihood of dying from a Covid-19 infection, which means you would have to look at the infection mortality rate and not the CFR. So in that sense I think it actually would be somewhat comforting if if it turns out many more people have already been infected than previously assumed. But just to be clear, I don’t want to pretend anyone can reliably claim this considering we still don’t have enough data to create models that can be used to approximate infection rates.