Name:   MartiniMan - Subject:   Your Math is Correct but Number is Still Wrong Date:   4/6/2020 4:57:27 PM

The way the mortality rate for the flu is calculated is you divide the number of deaths from the flu by the TOTAL number of cases.  I put total in caps because that is the important number, not confirmed cases.  The vast majority of flu cases each year are never reported, they never go to the hospital and they are certainly not tested.  They get sick, are miserable for a week and then get better.  So they have to estimate the total number of cases which is why there is such a big range on the CDC website for the flu.  The mortality rate for the flu in this season was estimated to be around 0.1%.

The last I saw was they were projecting a mortality of 0.6% for the Wuhan virus.  Again, that is not based on confirmed cases, it is based on some estimate of the total number of cases.  Where that estimate came from I do not know.  But my belief is that the virus has been here for some time, maybe as long as the flu season.  We didn't recognize it until the China could no longer lie about it and then we began testing and counting numbers.  But the early numbers using only confirmed cases and comparing to the flu were flat out wrong.

As a mental exercise when this is over I am going to try to do a similar daily count for the flu, including hospitalizations and deaths.  What I hope comes out of that is that this virus peaked a little later and had a little higher mortality than the ordinary flu.  Won't know until we see what the bell curve looks like.