ncov-cfr

This NEJM article you referenced (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387) is a poor estimate of the Case Fatality Ratio. I'm perplexed it passed peer-review (I'm not even an expert, so why am I finding such glaring flaws?) It's citing two references (ref. 4 and ref. 5) that estimate CFR at respectively 2% and 1.4%, however both use the naïve CFR formula (deaths/cases) that's known to underestimate the CFR due to deaths lagging cases in a rapidly growing outbreak. I wrote about this bias and provided 5 peer-reviewed epidemiological papers that also document it, see: https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/ Then it remarks that many mild cases are probably not detected (ie. high underascertainment) but strangely makes no effort at quantifying it, or referencing other papers that do quantify it. The 4 best published stu

You are probably right that the numbers out of Hubei province are inflated and less severe cases are underrepresented. Unfortunately, according to some experts, the case fatality rate of ~2% seems to hold even for cases outside of China. Statistical modeling of the case fatality rate using only cases and deaths reported from outside China was done by Christian L. Althaus (Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern), this estimates the CFR for COVID-19 at 2.1% although with a high uncertainty (95% confidence interval: 0.5%-5.4%). Data and R code for his modeling are available on Github: https://github.com/calthaus/ncov-cfr A comment from Adam Kucharski (Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/122970801348691148... "... The upshot: the wide