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[quote=Anonymous]Sorry no. The point is that if you are computing the death rate from the cases that are tested/treated in hospitals you are not getting the real death rate [b]of the disease. [/b]You are mixing together the effects of 1) getting only the worse cases to the hospital (there are LOTS of people who got the disease in the mild form and never even went to the hospital.., 2) your own hospital/country/... ability to get those on ventilator (there is a reason why China built three extra hospitals in Wuhan -- they needed the extra beds -- the triage happening in France/Italy is because they are lacking the beds and the ventilators). 
This is what is called "a selection effect" -- You are measuring a sample which has been "selected" (only the worse...)--

For measuring the death rate of the disease,  you will need to know the total number of people who actually had the virus, not just the number of people  you tested and received in the hospital.

So yes, you can compute a death rate from the recovered people but this is not a good indicator of the death rate of the disease itself -- That is why I say that the ratio of cured/treated is an OK proxy for the status of care in the county/hospital.... -- because it measures the number of the worst cases you were able to cure -- Both are linked because (cured+death=treated), and you could really use either one but again, you are not measuring the death rate of the disease itself.

The only set-up in which this number is known is the cruise ship which was quarantined -- The [b]entire population[/b] of the ship was tested and we know how many got infected and how many died -- but here, the numbers are difficult to extrapolate to the general population because of course, the cruise demographics are nothing like a reflection of the true composition of a country (or even a town).

People can estimate how many people are believe to be infected (and one can do that with models) but these are still "educated guesses".

This is also why there are so many conflicting opinions -- There are A LOT of unknowns in this situation. There is no need to go all hysteria about it. So far, this disease has killed a thousand times less than the seasonal flu. When all is over, I would vote to make statistics and probability mandatory classes from the K to 12.

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