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A comment on WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency. Parent comment

Re:WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency by baq on Thursday January 30, 2020 @04:32PM (#22195924)
couldn't believe these numbers, read the link. correctness is obvious in retrospect, numbers are trivial to calculate by hand by just looking at daily data.

still can't believe them.

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Re:WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency by mrb on Thursday January 30, 2020 @05:08PM (#22196320)
"Just looking at daily data" is your mistake. Essentially, it takes N days for the virus to kill, so deaths will lag confirmed cases by N days, and thus the calculated case fatality rate using this method is incorrect. This is why epidemiologists call it a "naïve esimator" (see section 3.1 in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4540071/).
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