Why estimating population-based case fatality rates during epidemics may be misleading

Lucas Böttcher; Mingtao Xia; Tom Chou

However, as mentioned above, the CFR and other mortality measures are typically reported based on population data. Do these population-based measures, including CFR, provide reasonable measures of the probability of death of Estimates of mortality ratios (see Eqs. (8) and (14)) of SARS-CoV-2 infections in China and Italy. The "delayed" mortalityratio estimate CFR d corresponds to the number of deaths to date divided by total number of cases at time t − τres. Many studies use CFR d , although this metric underestimates the individual-based mortality (defined below). Another populationbased mortality ratio is Mp(t), the number of deaths divided by the sum of death and recovered cases, up to time t. The data are based on Ref. [5] .