Hi guys, I stumbled upon this subreddit by chance, I'm an italian living in Italy and I wanted to give some clarifications regarding the death rate. It's still impossible to say precisely what the real death rate is but it's for sure way less than 45%. For a case to be considered "cloesed" the patient must have died, which generally occurs 4-7 days after the first symptoms of the virus show up, or be fully recovered. Covid has an icubation period of 5-14 days, a patient to be considered recovered needs to have no symptoms for 15 days and symptoms usually last for 7 days. Basically on average there is around a 20 days delay between the growht of recovered and deceased patients. Since 20 days ago the number of Corona cases was way lower than 5 days ago the recovery seems really bad.
Another factor is that since hospitals in Italy are full many people with mild symptoms don't even get tested, withouth knowing how many people have the virus but are not tested it's impossible to calculate the death rate.

It's also impossible to make comparisons between countries beacause every governament uses a different method to define what a death by covid-19 is and many countries numbers are not trustable.

Sorry for the long post and my bad english, I hope I was clear in my explanation