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Johns Hopkins count as of May 4th was 3,646,206 “confirmed” infections total deaths 255,486     which is about 7%  death rate.   The key word is confirmed

Now with the antibody testing we are hearing that for every confirmed infection there may be 3 or more unconfirmed infections. 

Based on that the actual number of infections being so much higher than the "confirmed" infections than the death rate could be well below 2% .....Only time will tell

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You can't compute a death rate if you don't actually know the number of cases.

Good piece from the BBC understands why the rate numbers are all over the place.

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First, there is confusion about what people mean by “death rate”. This confusion can make countries’ numbers look vastly different, even if their populations are dying at the same rate.

There are, in fact, two kinds of fatality rate. The first is the proportion of people who die who have tested positive for the disease. This is called the “case fatality rate”. The second kind is the proportion of people who die after having the infection overall; as many of these will never be picked up, this figure has to be an estimate. This is the “infection fatality rate”.

In other words, the case fatality rate describes how many people doctors can be sure are killed by the infection, versus how many people the virus kills overall, says Carl Heneghan, an epidemiologist and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford; he is also a GP in recovery from a suspected Covid-19 infection.

To see what a difference this makes, consider 100 people who have been infected with Covid-19. Ten of them have it so severely that they go into hospital, where they test positive for Covid-19. The other 90 are not tested at all. One of the hospital patients then dies from the virus. The other 99 people survive.

That would give a case fatality rate of one in 10, or 10%. But the infection fatality rate would be just one in 100, or 1%.

So if some countries only test patients ill enough to go to hospital – and don’t test the less-ill (or even asymptomatic) Covid-19 patients who don’t get to hospital (which is what the UK is currently doing) – the death rate can appear higher than in countries where testing is widespread (such as Germany or South Korea).

Obviously one can neither compare nor average numbers when the testing rates are not even close to being equal.

The piece goes on to address the problem of what counts as a CV death when there are other illnesses present.  

Quote

 At present in the US, any death of a Covid-19 patient, no matter what the physician believes to be the direct cause, is counted for public reporting as a Covid-19 death.

“I expect that the final death certificate will have Covid along with pre-existing conditions, should there be any,” says Cécile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. “But at this point, any Covid-positive case who dies will be tallied in the US death count.”

 

It's a well reasoned and written look at the problem with the current numbers and how that might be resolved.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200401-coronavirus-why-death-and-mortality-rates-differ

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15 minutes ago, Mostlylost said:

Johns Hopkins count as of May 4th was 3,646,206 “confirmed” infections total deaths 255,486     which is about 7%  death rate.   The key word is confirmed

Now with the antibody testing we are hearing that for every confirmed infection there may be 3 or more unconfirmed infections. 

Based on that the actual number of infections being so much higher than the "confirmed" infections than the death rate could be well below 2% .....Only time will tell

I saw an article that health authorities in No. Cal. are estimating 70 to 80 for every confirmed infection. Pick a number and take your chances.

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