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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

>As of the morning, per Global Times, Hubei has 2.67% ratio of deaths to cases.

This is a _confirmed_ deaths to _confirmed_ cases. Unless everyone has been reliably tested, we'd expected the number of actual cases to be higher given it can present with mild-to-no symptoms and such cases are less likely to be tested/identified.

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There are also likely to be a number of deaths of patients who were never tested and therefore classified as ordinary pneumonia or flu deaths, rather than COVID-19. So it's not obvious that the long term mortality rate would be less than the raw figures.

Another concern is that the ratio of recovered to dead stays distressingly low, although that may reflect a rather long course for the disease of around 3 weeks.

If we had historical data on pneumonia and flu deaths there, we could compare current rates to that, and if the current rate was significantly higher than usual then it'd be reasonable to count the excess as COVID-19 deaths. I don't know if that data exists though.

An NTD reporter had a similar idea, but focused on total deaths in the city of Wuhan rather than just flu-like deaths. A funeral home staff member said that deaths per day was 4-5 times higher than before this epidemic started, but that only 6% of those deaths were labelled as "confirmed cases" that would count toward the official numbers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYYV1B1lRKY

Assuming a similar rate of undercounting across other funeral homes in the city, that would put the real death count so far at about 14,000. This is despite extraordinary efforts by the Chinese government to prevent the spread of this virus.

(NTD has an axe to grind on this issue, but they have a reputation for factual honesty. I trust NTD's numbers far more than those of the Chinese government. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ntd-tv-new-tang-dynasty/ )

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