The realization that China censors heavily makes both accurate, timely and complete reporting of facts much more difficult. Intermediaries are used to exfil data to Western journalists, but this is haphazard, slow and incomplete. A journalist who has contacts on the ground described the situation, including that a few bodies on the streets and in crashed vehicles (people who were too sick who failed to make it to a hospital) in central Wuhan were not being collected: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/7/laurie_garrett_china_c... We may never know the exact numbers because it's likely face-saving deception will be used for geopolitical and local political concerns.
I would look at those numbers again. It seems to be the percentage of all deaths.
Based on National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) mortality surveillance data available on February 6, 2020, 7.1% of the deaths occurring during the week ending January 25, 2020 (week 4) were due to P&I. This percentage is below the epidemic threshold of 7.2% for week 4.
If you like, every year the flu is a low-level "pandemic" of a relative sort. It goes almost unnoticed like antibiotic/antimycotic-resistant pathogens that are rapidly becoming untreatable due to a combination of factors including over-prescription, meat agriculture, human over-population and low-cost travel.
Oddly enough, I used to work at a biomedical informatics department where one of the projects used commercial data from retail stores to predict and identify bioweapon exposure and pandemics from people buying OTC remedies and prescriptions.
I don’t know how to interpret this that’s why I’m asking.
It seems like the media is captivated by what seems like a relatively small number of deaths in China compared to the 12,000+ here at home.
A Chinese supplier of mine actually pointed this out when he told me to “stay safe” and I was like what the hell is he talking about, but then I googled it and now I’m like wtf.
In late January, Chinese media widely reported "news" about an American flu "epidemic" to distract from nCoV. However, the US CDC reports pneumonia and influenza deaths as a percent of overall mortality on a weekly basis, and right now the numbers are shy of what they consider an epidemic. The rate of lab confirmed cases is tracking 2012-2013, and mortality looks about the same as last year.
The current nCoV outbreak is more worrying because the percentage of patients needing intensive care is very high, and because it looks very easy to spread.
That's not the mortality rate but the ratio against overall deaths. it says: "The percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza is 7.1%, below the epidemic threshold of 7.2%."
Initial estimates of mortality rate are all over the place due to uncertainty in the data sets.
That said, the best estimate at the moment is around 2-3% and is subject to change as more data comes in.