Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2014 October 9

= October 9 =

Case fatality rate question
I have a question regarding an accurate case fatality rate for Ebola virus disease. Using this WHO table:, what would you estimate as the correct CFR? Gandydancer (talk) 17:43, 9 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't think there is a "correct" CFR that can be derived from that table. I added the rows, and got 2387 cases and 1590 deaths. This leads to a naive calculation of ~67% CFR (rounded to nearest whole percentage) for all strains and all locations in the table. I believe the data from the WHO, but I also suspect there is a good reason why they didn't add a final "total" row. Keep in mind this is for several different strains of Ebola, and in many different populations (different immune systems) and times (different technologies). All of these can influence the CFR, and so calculating a "total" CFR might well be misleading. Compare e.g. 2009_flu_pandemic to the 1918_flu_pandemic, and you'll see a very different CFR. Anyway, I'm happy to do the calculation, but I caution anyone on making any firm conclusions from this number, especially any inference that this number might be useful for predicting results of the current outbreak. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:58, 10 October 2014 (UTC)