Editorial | Hong Kong data on coronavirus death rate has to add up
- Accuracy is important when it comes to offering pandemic policy advice and making decisions in a city currently focused on treatment and prevention
It would be good if experts and officials could base pandemic policy advice and decisions on reliable data of the death rate among infected people.
They cannot, because they have no idea of the total number of Covid-19 infections, boosted by the Omicron variant.
The official tally of more than 1 million confirmed cases does not include undetected asymptomatic or mild cases, misdiagnosis as flu or failure to report a positive test.
This has prompted Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to say that further analysis is warranted to ascertain the real number, citing suggestions from infectious diseases expert Professor Ivan Hung Fan-ngai of the University of Hong Kong. “Whether it is 1, 2, 3 or 4 million will make a lot of difference,” Lam said.
It weighs on the death rate, which could range from 0.65 per cent of 1 million cases to 0.18 per cent of 4 million, not much more than for a flu epidemic. Hung said the overall death rate was lower than the official figure.
Separately, preliminary analysis by the Hospital Authority has found that 30 per cent of deaths among Covid-19 patients appeared to be unrelated to the disease.