From the link above: 14628 are currently infected(?) 305 were infected and died 348 were infected and recovered
Unless most the infections occurred very recently which is pretty unlikely.
I think my 98% is probably a bit too optimistic, but your 53% is way beyond pessimistic.
Why? People can be sick for quite some time (in this case, a month, maybe?) and then ultimately die from the disease, this is actually like ... the most common scenario ...
I have been unpleasantly surprised by how much people struggle to understand this simple concept. Recovered / (recovered+death) is how you do it. It's common sense, come on ...
In the end, when everything is tallied up, sure. But in the meantime, in the presence of so much uncertainty, "common sense" is only going to lead you astray.
The only thing we can say is : as of now the survival rate is 98%. It will probably go down, nobody knows how much.
The mistake that you are making in your "simple math equation" is as follows. It is easier to count the number of deaths than it is to count the number of recovered. This messes up your math.
If you miscount a large amount on your recovered numbers, then this will make the death rate look worse than it actually is.
Usually, not from a viral infection. The usual scenario from a viral infection is that if you are not dead in 2 weeks, you will almost certainly recover.
There are exceptions, but nothing I've read about this virus leads to the conclusion that it is one of those.
Anyway, this is a disease that spreads very widely very quickly. We are arguing about the known numbers when the most likely scenario is that it is already everywhere but not reported, so the known numbers are only noise.
You might do better to compare the number of deaths to the number of infected from a few weeks ago, which was a much lower number than today.
As a thought experiment, if you infected an entire city with the flu, the ones to show up at the hospital are the worst cases, and if you just built your data from those people, you'd get a really really skewed perspective.
I think this is born out by the really small number of children showing up in the mortality numbers. Proportionally, kids usually over-represent transmission, I think, from kid-level hygiene and being crowded into small classrooms. They seem under-represented in the study population, which makes me think there could be a lot of selection bias being captured.
Additionally, the standard for recovery is really high and is built in a way that it will severely lag deaths (which have no waiting period). I think it was something like total clearance of the virus, not "feels good, now surfs reddit all day."
I'm not trying to fearmonger and I realize this is potentially in the same league as screaming fire in a very crowded theater. But we all are aware of the numbers, and even ignoring the fact that they're underreported, the current correctly calculated mortality rate is grave.
Now, given that this is still unfolding, it's possible that only those with weakened immune systems are dying, as usual. But even then at this point dead/recovered is a severe indicator. Plus rumor is R0 1-4 and it is likely more contagious than SARS - hell, look at what we do know about China's response; far more comprehensive and restricted than outbreaks past.
It's early for panic, but not too early to prepare. As soon as the public heard catches wind of just how significant this is, I guarantee stores will empty overnight.
From watching videos from inside wuhan, there seem to be hints that this thing is somewhat similar to the flu and I think it is possible, even likely, that there is a massive swath of unregistered infected, and the hospital based study is an extremely self selected group of people--as in there is a high mortality rate and ventilator usage among people who felt bad enough to check themselves in, and were bad enough to admit.