WHO hikes Wuhan coronavirus death rate to 3.4%

世界衛生組織（WHO）上修武漢肺炎死亡率至3.4％

With more data available outside of China, WHO raises mortality rate of Wuhan coronavirus from 2% to 3.4%

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — With much more data from outside of China now available, the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday (March 3) raised its estimate of the average death rate for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) from 2 percent to 3.4 percent.

Before the disease spread significantly to the outside world, the WHO through most of February estimated the mortality rate to be around 2 percent. This was largely based on highly questionable statistics from China, which showed an average daily death rate that mysteriously never fluctuated far above or below 2.1 percent for weeks.

Many scientists have questioned China's death rate statistics, as they present a near-perfect prediction model rather than sporadic spikes and troughs. Melody Goodman, associate professor of biostatistics at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, told Barron's that a regression run on China's data on fatality rates yielded a near-perfect r-squared (measurement of variance) score of 99.99 percent, which she said is never seen with real data.

"I have never in my years seen an r-squared of 0.99. As a statistician it makes me question the data," said Goodman. She said that when it comes to public health data, a high score would be a 0.7.

Goodman added that "Anything like 0.99 would make me think that someone is simulating data. It would mean you already know what is going to happen."

By February 24, the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom estimated that the fatality rate in Wuhan ranged between two and four percent, while the death rate in the rest of China was 0.7 percent. He claimed that his team estimated that measures taken in the communist country had "averted a significant number of cases," without providing any specifics.

However, in the week since, the number of confirmed cases and reported deaths have skyrocketed in Iran, South Korea, and Italy, providing much more data from outside China. With this data in hand, Tedros on Tuesday (March 3) patted China on the back for lowering its number of cases and announced that 80 percent of the new cases outside of China had been reported in Iran, South Korea, and Italy.

Adhanom then dramatically increased the estimated average mortality rate, saying, "Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died," He then pointed out that this percentage is far higher than the one percent death rate for those who contract the flu.

According to The New York Times, in the U.S., the death rate for the seasonal flu is typically around 0.1 percent, not one percent as Adhanom claimed.

The WHO head then proudly proclaimed that "evidence from China" indicated that only one percent of cases reported were asymptomatic. Yet in Japan, as of Feb. 26, 19 out of 186 infected patients, or 10.2 percent, had not shown any symptoms, excluding passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, reported Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.