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The arrogance. If you want, an exert from an epidemiology text: "A CFR can only be considered final when all the cases have been resolved (either died or reco

The arrogance. If you want, an exert from an epidemiology text: "A CFR can only be considered final when all the cases have been resolved (either died or recovered). The preliminary CFR, for example, during an outbreak with a high daily increase and long resolution time would be substantially lower than the final CFR." The cited numbers are preliminary CFR, not final CFR. The key question is final IFR. Final IFR can be lower or higher than preliminary CFR. I'm done here.

jsight 6y ago
At least in the US, we are no longer in a period that qualifies as an "outbreak with a high daily increase". That implies a high increase relative to the current case count, which really isn't the case any more once you have a population case rate of 5%. I would be cautious about estimating countries that are only now having their first major outbreak (for example Czechia) for exactly the reason that you cite, but not every country is in that state. Put another way, we are no longer living with preliminary data in much of the world.
- woofie11 6y ago
  Let's toss some real numbers here. * Last death of Diamond Princess occurred after more than 2 months. * Over the past two months, the number of known cases in the US roughly doubled from 8 million to 16 million. This means there are a lot of people who haven't died yet, and dividing deaths by cases is an underestimate of CFR by up to a factor of 2. That doesn't mean we don't have the data. We could e.g. take the infections from June and look at how many of those resulted in death as a final CFR estimate. However, the number I gave (deaths over cases) didn't do that. It's a preliminary CFR without that sort of correction, and a correction to final IFR can go up (people who haven't died yet) or down (unidentified cases). anoncake argued this was an overestimate by definition, and anyone who said otherwise didn't have a clue. anoncake was wrong.

jsight 6y ago

At least in the US, we are no longer in a period that qualifies as an "outbreak with a high daily increase". That implies a high increase relative to the current case count, which really isn't the case any more once you have a population case rate of 5%. I would be cautious about estimating countries that are only now having their first major outbreak (for example Czechia) for exactly the reason that you cite, but not every country is in that state. Put another way, we are no longer living with preliminary data in much of the world.

woofie11 6y ago
Let's toss some real numbers here. * Last death of Diamond Princess occurred after more than 2 months. * Over the past two months, the number of known cases in the US roughly doubled from 8 million to 16 million. This means there are a lot of people who haven't died yet, and dividing deaths by cases is an underestimate of CFR by up to a factor of 2. That doesn't mean we don't have the data. We could e.g. take the infections from June and look at how many of those resulted in death as a final CFR estimate. However, the number I gave (deaths over cases) didn't do that. It's a preliminary CFR without that sort of correction, and a correction to final IFR can go up (people who haven't died yet) or down (unidentified cases). anoncake argued this was an overestimate by definition, and anyone who said otherwise didn't have a clue. anoncake was wrong.