On: Japan confirms coronavirus infections without symp...

[contravariant]

I'm just dividing the number of (known) deaths by the number of known infections.

As other's have pointed out this isn't the most reliable way of doing it, but it gives some indication.

[edejong → contravariant]

No, it does not give any information for a multitude of reasons.

1. Deaths are lagged by known cases

2. Both are skewed distributions

3. These people might have received professional care when it was available. During an outbreak, the available health care will decline.

[contravariant → edejong]

Those just mean the estimate is inaccurate. When dealing with something entirely unknown almost any estimate is better than nothing.

Sure it could end up being off by a factor 10 either way, but even then it's still informative.

[edejong → contravariant]

Estimations work when dealing with symmetrical distributions. You might be wrong either way. But these distributions are fundamentally not symmetrical! Also, you should compare deaths with number of cases a couple of days ago (like 7), since that’s the time between diagnosis and death.

[irq11 → edejong]

The distributions are asymmetrical in exactly the way that argues against your fear-mongering across this thread: only the most serious cases are self-selecting for treatment and testing.

The infection rate is, in all likelihood, much higher than these early numbers suggest. People don’t go to the hospital for sniffles, and therefore, the bulk of infections don’t show up. Deaths almost always get counted.