South Korea have a lot of early stage cases in those numbers (haven’t died, haven’t recovered), and a very young population on the whole. An undetermined number of those cases will die rather than recover.
Multiple sources have looked for these large majorities of asymptomatic cases and did not find them. There is no evidence other than our collective hunches that these cases exist in significant numbers.
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):
Not sure what the demographics of S. Korea is, whether they have a younger population or not, but it's irrelevant.
At least 80%-85% of all Covid-2019 cases have mild symptoms. We are not talking about completely asymptomatic cases, we are talking about a majority of cases that could pass for a mere cold or flu.
Many of those will not go to a hospital or be tested, especially if the system is overwhelmed.
Italy could easily have more than 10 times the number of reported cases because they stopped testing proactively. Only people with difficulty breathing are now tested and these represent a small minority of cases.
I gave S.Korea as an example because AFAIK they are the only ones doing large scale testing of the population and they aren't China (whom we may or may not trust to be transparent).
The data we have points to a mortality rate that's less than 1%.
When you see a mortally greater than that it is because people aren't tested unless they reach the ICU.
A couple of things I’m not sure are correct there though.
The 80-85% mild cases comes from confirmed cases that we know about. They’re included in the current 6.45% death rate from the JH data.
China may or may not be transparent, but if they have an incentive to hide anything, it would be a higher death rate rather than a lower one.
The data is the data. In any case it’s now global and the 6.45% is actually higher than it was before the virus started growing exponentially outside of China (it was 5.7% from this dataset then).
South Korea have a lot of early stage cases in those numbers (haven’t died, haven’t recovered), and a very young population on the whole. An undetermined number of those cases will die rather than recover.
Multiple sources have looked for these large majorities of asymptomatic cases and did not find them. There is no evidence other than our collective hunches that these cases exist in significant numbers.
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):
125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes
4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)