Thanks for the clarifying question. I was talking about case fatality rate, or the number of people that die from the disease out of total cases.

It's certainly possible that SARSCoV2 will have fewer total deaths than H1N1.

Thank you for clarifying, but what I'm thinking is that our CFR denominator is off by a whole lot right now. Could be wrong, of course, I'm still not an epidemiologist.

My, also not epidemiologist estimate, would be that the only way to have any measure on the spread today when comparing countries is the number of deaths per capita compared to the strain of the healthcare system. Add some factor for the mean time from infection to death and you have it.

Everyone who is ill enough to be about to die will end up in a hospital, with the virus already being transmitted in the society the point in testing everyone else is trending towards negligible.

Sure if the measures taken allows the rate becomes low enough again, then contact tracing might become worth doing again.

You can also try to do statistical tests on some cohorts of population and extrapolate from there but if the resources are limited then saving lives counts more.

> number of people that die from the disease out of total cases.

Out of confirmed infections. The fatality rate would only decrease as more people are discovered to have been infected.

Yeah, the problem is that diseases have effectively 2 different fatality rates: one for those who get medical attention, and one for those who don't. As a medical system approaches saturation, it becomes harder to get medical attention to those who need it, and the fatality rate rises to the second value. That's why fast-spreading illnesses end up deadlier.

Hopefully we can avoid saturating the medical system in the US.