This is so disingenuous. I can’t believe the WHO would say it - and I am shocked that they are not being called out for it. This 3.4% number is the deaths/currently infected. The majority of cases haven’t recovered or died yet.
There is a name for this method of calculating CFR, it’s referred to as the Naïve CFR, and everyone (including the WHO) knows that it grossly underestimates the true CFR.
But don’t take my word for it — here’s a quote from a recent study on the novel coronavirus: “The time from the illness onset to death is also comparable to SARS [15], and the 15–20-day mean delay indicates that a crude estimation of the ratio of the cumulative number of deaths
to that of confirmed cases will tend to result in an underestimation of the case fatality risk, especially during the early stage of epidemic spread.”mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/…
Or take a look at this study Methods for Estimating the Case Fatality Ratio for a Novel, Emerging Infectious Disease which looks and how different methodologies perform in estimating CFR. The Naïve CFR (simple estimate 1 in the study) grossly underestimated SARS — calculating
as low as 2.5% CFR when the true number was ~13% academic.oup.com/aje/article/16… 
The methodology that was accurate was to look at the resolved cases (simple estimate 2). CFR = deaths/ (deaths + recoveries).
Not only is the CFR that the WHO is publicizing based on a flawed methodology that is *certainly* underestimating the true CFR, there are other studies that use more reasonable methodologies and get a more reasonable CFR estimates.
4.8% Clinical characteristics of 50466 patients with 2019-nCoV infection medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
4.6% or 7.7% Real time estimation of the risk of death from novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infection: Inference using exported cases medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
7% Estimating the cure rate and case fatality rate of the ongoing epidemic COVID-19 medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
All off the lower estimates I have see are based on the flawed deaths/cases methodology, or were early estimates that assumed we were missing a huge number of mild cases — which would drive down the case fatality rate (CFR). The mission from China has said that they see
NO evidence for this. To quote “One of the hopes of people watching China’s coronavirus outbreak was that the alarming picture of its lethality is probably exaggerated because a lot of mild cases are likely being missed. But on Tuesday, a World Health Organization
expert suggested that does So I know everybody’s been out there saying, ‘Whoa, this thing is spreading everywhere and we just can’t see it, tip of the iceberg.’ But the data that we do have don’t support that,” statnews.com/2020/02/25/new…
When the true CFR becomes clear to the world, the W.H.O. will have lost the credibility it need to fight this outbreak. #CoronavirusOutbreak #Coronavirus #CoronaOutbreak
