It's a tricky calculation. There is a significant % of early mortality, and then there are the delayed deaths. For Germany I think you are being thrown by including early deaths from the massive ramp of cases, but then using a denominator from before the massive ramp.
Similarly, using today's numbers for Germany, as we know, will yield a LOW rate (149/31370 = 0.47%), just because those more prolonged and painful deaths have not yet occurred from the ramp.
The real answer is somewhere in between.
For SK, I was being deliberately conservative with my numbers so as not to overstate things. I take some issue with your number because you captured a small amount of the faster case ramp in your 7513 number (I think the true "roundoff" of cases occurred soon after they got to 8000 cases). So that makes a small error in the calculation.
However, it's true that only ~3500 of the 9000 cases in Korea have recovered as of now, so the current 1.3% mortality rate will likely go up somewhat as time goes by. Some people will struggle for a month to repair their lungs, but slowly suffocate and die, either due to the lung damage, or other co-morbidities, or organ damage that occurred.
So yes, I would not take issue with a true CFR of something like 1.5% in some populations. But the IFR is probably closer to 1% (similar to the cruise ship, but that has other confounding factors due to the population being sampled). So that would imply quite a few asymptomatic or mild cases. Perhaps 20-30% of the identified cases.
There's talk today about half of the people with the disease being asymptomatic, but I would suspect that is too high, just based on empirical results.
It is tricky, yet I don't see any force in your points, and one is flatly incorrect:
- There is nothing wrong with including early deaths. It would be wrong not to include them, since the number is compared to the total number of
known cases.
- The ramp in total cases starts about Feb 26th (26 cases), and the ramp of deaths starts about March 12th (6 deaths), about 2 weeks later. For total cases, March 10th (1545 cases) just looks as if it were early in the ramp because the number has meanwhile increased exponentially and the graph adjusted accordingly.
- And regardless, with Germany's number being 9.6%, there would be a lot of distance to cover to get down to your claim of 1.5% as the maximum for "decent quality".
- And for South Korea, the numbers for total cases (March 10th) is from the time when the curve already flattened.
- Sure, some deaths are from a time when the total cases were a little higher, but then, some deaths are form a time when the total cases were even lower and the curve steeper. In the case of South Korea, this argument may speak for an even higher mortality.
- You claim that your numbers were "deliberately conservative", but, as should be clear by now, the number you referred to for South Korea in that post (1.06%), is obviously miscalculated since it compares deaths to the
same day number of total known cases. You appear to be repeating the same mistake in this post by claiming the current mortality rate to be 1.3%, as it is apparently derived by comparing today's numbers.
- You think the South Korea number will "likely go up" from 1.3%, but by that method of calculation, that probably just depends on how much testing will be done.
I agree that IFR might be around 1% (who knows, it might be lower), but the future of deaths per known positives seems to just depend on the amount of testing.
