Of course, we need better data. But tunesmith was downplaying numbers with unsourced claims, so he needed to be corrected.

The latest stats: 54 deaths out of 1764 cases → 3.1% mortality rate https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/01/the-latest-coronavirus...

All things considered, it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower.

What we need is stats on cured vs died for confirmed cases, but I haven't seen recent figures on that for a while, plus there's an inevitable delay on declaring somebody cured.

«it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower.»

I don't think so, because deaths lag infections. When the outbreak is rapidly growing, if it takes about 5 days for the virus to kill, then even if you knew all the stats perfectly, you actually need to look at the ratio of "deaths as of day D" over "infections as of D-5" to calculate the mortality rate. If you do this math right now (291 infections as of Jan 20, 56 deaths as of Jan 25) you find the mortality rate is 19%. Assuming infections are underreported by a factor of 5, the mortality rate is still high at 19/5 = 3.8%.

This is highly speculative. What if the under reporting is 10% &c. It's just an exercise in arithmetic, we're going to have to wait for more data.