That doesn't work either because the definition of 'recovered' is something like 'symptom free for 40 days' and most people dying are doing so within 1-2 weeks. What you really need to do is divide the total deaths by the total known cases two weeks ago (roughly when the most recent deaths would have been infected).

Last time I did this it looked like the overall death rate would come out at ~4.5%, reporting methods have changed since then and now it's coming out as more like 4%.

Even worse, we don't know how many people have actually been infected. The reported death rates aren't reliable either.

All the estimates we're seeing are almost entirely from unreliable data coming out of China.

So I'd take these estimates with a huge grain of salt for now. We should be in a much better position to have reliable estimates in a month or two.

True. On the plus side, the higher the actual number of infections, the lower the death rates that we should be expecting. There's a growing consensus that the virus can spread asymptomatically which (while not good for containment) means we're only seeing a small fraction of cases and the death rate is going to be much more like that of the flu (which isn't great but also hasn't destroyed civilization as we know it).

While there may be asymptomatic spread (it's too early to be certain of that yet either), "asymptomatic transmission likely plays a minor role in the epidemic overall, WHO says. People who cough or sneeze are more likely to spread the virus, the agency wrote"[1]

[1] - https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...

Counterpoint:

> US traders were particularly rattled by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention confirming a COVID-19 infection in California in a person who apparently had no relevant travel history or exposure to another known patient. [1]

One asymptomatic carrier may not infect many people but if they infect even one new person in an as-yet-uninfected population center they'll create a new outbreak. The only defense against this is universal testing, otherwise by the time you start seeing symptoms it's too late.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-28/asx-carried-away-in-w...

Yes this is what people miss. There is a delay between known cases and deaths.