Am I looking these Covid-19 statistics wrong?

[Roy]

I see a lot of news agencies and governments reporting morality rate numbers like 2-4%, based on whatever nation it is or age group, but isn't a more honest statistic the CLOSED case rate? Either you recover from Coronavirus, or you don't and you die. There isn't another option. In that case the mortality rate is actually 21% right? Are they not putting this out to avoid mass panic? Am I just dumb and not reading these numbers right?

Stats came from these;

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=homeAdvegas1?

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

[Preety_India]

Some of these stats look exaggerated to me. 

Like I just read somewhere that 4000 people died in New York. 

But I checked on another source and the number was lesser than 3000.

 

Will need to do a lot of fact checking because the media is in a frenzied mode and just jumping at anything they get 

Reliable news is hard these days because it's too easy to manipulate numbers on a website. 

I don't think journalists care to actually go to the places to check things for themselves. They are too spooked for that. 

It's always easy to feed false data into a website and create a fake chart or numbers. It's also good fodder for traffic. 

At this point everything is just conjecture. 

Even YouTube cannot be trusted. 

Too many organizations revving up income through false reporting. 

Of course the situation is dire but the numbers are all bungled on different websites. 

 

 

[Roy]

True. The second link I posted is from John Hopkins University, which I think is a pretty legitimate source.

I imagine most of the data input into their servers is reliable, except from China............

[erik8lrl]

The death rate is around 5%. The 21% is not counting those who still have symptoms but only those who either died or are fully recovered. 

  
I have family living in China and China's number is real, they went into total lockdown nationwide since January. They took the virus extremely seriously, had tests at all places, and built hospitals to contain all those who are infected. The numbers in other countries seem so much worse is because they can't take the same degree of action as China to prevent the spread. So the healthcare system gets overwhelmed while more and more people spread the virus. The lack of equipment for healthcare workers and the sheer amount of cases will lead to more deaths because people are simply not getting treated. I think this is why the death rate might be higher for some countries than for others. For example, Singapore has a case number of 1,189, but only 6 deaths (.5%). While Spain has 126,168 cases and 11,947 deaths (9.4%).

 

Source:

 

Edited April 5, 2020 by erik8lrl

[universe]

How reliable are these numbers? For Deaths, they are getting tracked at the hospital. Id think they are somewhat correct but definitely some are left out (example people who died at home) and some might be included but the cause of death wasnt the virus.

Where it gets tricky is the infection rate. Some countries dont do as much tests, so you might have 1 million people infected but if you only test 20.000 you will end up with an infection rate much lower then that. For example in the US I'd expect the infection numbers to be around 3-10times higher than reported. Because they test so little. Germany tests a lot, so their numbers are more representative. I'd say maybe the real number of infected is only up to 2 times higher.

 

Now for the fatality rate, look up the case fatality rate (CFR). These numbers seem about right to me (divided by age group)

Age 0-9: 0.0094%

Age 10-19: 0.022%

Age 20-29: 0.091%

Age 30-39: 0.18%

Age 40-49: 0.4%

Age 50-59: 1.3%

Age 60-69: 4.6% (range 3.8-5.4)

Age 70-79: 9.8% (range 8.2-12)

Age 80+: 18% (range 14-22)

 

CFR should represent the number of deaths from all people who have the virus (weak, mild or critical cases). Whereas your numbers only represent death from people who where tested positive (likely skewed towards critical cases & excluding people who didnt get tested).

Note: All numbers are only estimates

[remember]

also be aware that in the beginning they tested probably less people with only mild symptoms because they couldn’t test everyone, also probably some post mortem tested people, that’s what happened in italy, too. now there are more tests and more laboratories - so there are probably some recovered cases which are not showing in the statistics, which also is an explanation for how the cases exploded into these huge numbers so fast.

they start to develop methods now to test anti genes, so people in the future will be able to see if they are already immune. but like the tests in the past they don’t exist yet in a big enough number.

Edited April 5, 2020 by remember

[Free Mind]

The 21% mortality rate does not include the open cases of asymptotic people and symptomatic people who can potentially recover. Also, a large number of open case people who end up recovering won’t be recorded as a close case.