why cant the death rate be the actual real wuhan virus deaths divided by the population?
seems like the death rate to me
you might also calculate the rate of death in any subset of the population you might want but that rate would not be as accurate
Originally Posted by nevergaveitathought
That's what I was largely pointing out in the my previous post in this thread.
There are many who are using the term "death rate" without actually qualifying which one it is. This is being done for both statistical analysis and by some to try and spread fear by always choosing the worst case scenarios in their usage of it.
If you look at the touted John Ioannidis piece, he very explicitly refers to his discussion being the "case" fatality rate and he throws in qualifiers and estimates all over the place as caveats and that his estimate was based almost solely on very early on data from that Princess Line Cruise.
While his thesis of the WHO's numbers being way high is certainly coming to fruition, he's gotta be laughing at anyone trying to pin his early March numbers as anything close to "accurate".
In the end, the crude(or population based) fatality rate is all that is going to matter, but will not be known(and obviously as Ioannidis notes with the flu) not actually accurate as you will never have accurate counts of true cause of death, just approximations.
The other "death rates" as Ioannidis points out are only useful in trending and only if the reliability of the trending data is there, which it to date hasn't been.
The true value of Ioannidis's pieces lies in that the many used the initial numbers like the WHO, to overblow the expected worldwide death rate and reasoned analysis should occur and be reviewed regularly.