Human beings are constantly struggling with various epidemics. Although we gained a lot of experience and success, in the face of the new epidemic, we still inevitably face pressure from public health, politics, and the economy. Case fatality ratio (CFR) received widespread attention as one of the indicators describing the severity of the epidemic and evaluating treatment options. However, due to the ongoing epidemic situation and the constant changes in the death and diagnosis data, no scientific method for this situation to calculate the CFR exists. This study proposes a method for estimating CFR in the continuation of the epidemic. CFR is estimated by "ratio of the cumulative number of deaths before j days from a given day to the sum of the number of patients discharged from a given day and the cumulative number of deaths before j days from a given day ". Take the ongoing outbreak of COVID COVID-19 in December 2019 as an example. The results show that, regardless of the size of the estimated value or its changing trend, the estimated CFR given by the new method shows better stability and better reflects the true situation of the case fatality rate; additionally, the improvement of medical conditions can also be clearly reflected in the change in valuation. When j = 10, according to the data of March 10, the CFR of COVIDCOVID-19 in Wuhan, China and China (excluding Hubei)is 6.23%,4.46%, and 0.87%, respectively. This method of estimating CFR can be used in time to evaluate the therapeutic effect of different medical schemes and different regions, which is of great value and significance for the decision decision-making in the epidemic
prevention and control.
Authors Wanling Hu, Xiaoyun Liu, and Tao Wang contributed equally to this work