General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Contrary to Fox Noise, Coronavirus is not like the flu. Simple numbers I found: [View all]mr_lebowski
(33,643 posts)If there's 100,000 'cases with known outcome', and in 3400 of these cases, the patient died ... then the death rate is considered to be 3.4%.
The fact that 200K, 500K, 1M other people technically 'got the disease' as well ... is not relevant and is not used for calculation of death rates for any disease. Because that number is unknown, and it will always be unknown.
And 'hospitalizations' are not synonymous with 'known cases', for COVID or Flu.
Think of this as working something like a 'poll' would work. If I randomly sample 1000 people and 520 say they would vote for Biden, we can assume that the actual percentage of the total voting population that would vote for Biden would fall within a certain (fairly small) % range from 52%.
It doesn't matter that we failed to ask the other 279,999,000 other voters (or whatever the number is) who they'd vote for.