[mempko]

Or think about it this way, this means as a percentage of real people infected, the mortality rate of COVID-19 is higher than thought. This false-positive rate means that the number of real cases is lower than reported and therefore mortality rate is higher. In other words, COVID-19 is more dangerous than thought if you catch it. Then again, I'm sure the actual cases dwarfs those reported since not everyone has been tested.

[glofish]

Mortality is almost always much lower than the initially reported and observed numbers.

There could be many more people that never even get to the testing phase.

[gpderetta]

AFAIK, that wasn't the case with SARS.

[ineedasername]

The same would be true of things like the Flu then too. Which means the true mortality rate of Flu is much lower, so even if COVID-19 is lower than current estimates for the same reason, it is still an order of magnitude higher than something like the Flu.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's possible to get more accurate numbers for the flu because it's so prevalent, which makes it possible to do random sampling of the general population. If you did random sampling of the general population for this coronavirus right now, ~100% of the positive results would be erroneous because probably less than 0.01% of the population actually has it.

[ineedasername]

That's an excellent point! Thank you!

[dnautics]

Yes, and that's why absolute population normalized mortality rate is the only really comparable thing across populations.

[lbj]

The mortality rate in Denmark is still a flat 0.0