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3.4% mortality rate reported by WHO seems to be not as accurate then https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-
by rdtsc 7y ago
3.4% mortality rate reported by WHO seems to be not as accurate then https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---3-march-2020 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...
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Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died
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That was used as a basis quite a few decisions, how to treat patients, when to close / open various locations, etc. It does say "reported" in the report, but I think often that part of ignored and many officials assumed it to be as a rate based on infected cases.
The article does mention this issue, and I wonder what the new / updated mortality rate is then based on this data.
- zucker42 7y agoI think all the serious scientific papers I've read have long put fatality estimates far below what early WHO press releases suggested.
- jsnell 7y agoI mean, you're tecnically correct in that the number is no longer accurate. But actually the change has been in the other direction. That link is talking about the CFR, not the IFR, and the CFR is up to 7% these days. (170k dead out of 2.5M confirmed cases). No credible source that I saw ever suggested that the IFR was 3%, and that is not what any decisions were based on. Everyone knows that some cases will be missed. The early IFR estimates were all huge ranges like 0.1%-2%, precisely since there was so little information early on about how many cases were not being detected. (And it is surprising how little we've managed to narrow that range down). There are other claims in that WHO link that are obviously wrong in retrospect. E.g. the claim that Covid transmits less efficiently than the flu.