Visualize how much confirmed cases might reflect actual cases based on reported deaths

[nCov19-DataPoints]

For a lot of countries we can assume that the number of deaths by infection with nCov-19 is a fairly accurate reflection of the actual situation.

However we cannot assume the same for the number of reported confirmed cases - coverage here clearly wildly differs between different countries, e. g. compare South Korea and Italy.

The number of reported deaths however gives a very rough idea about the number of actual cases around 12 days ago (the rough average time between infection and death, if death occurs, need to find the paper with that number again). Assuming a mortality rate of about 2% (as long as the health system is not overwhelmed that seems still high), we can make a back-of-the-envelope estimate, that 12 days ago, the number of actual infected people (+recovered people) was about 50 times the number of dead people until today.

If you take that simple measuring stick to Italy (or actually quite a lot of other countries), it is obvious that only a fraction of the actual cases have been diagnosed and reported as confirmed cases.

It would be nice to translate into some sort of confidence measure displayed on the map. Probably better not to use numbers, because this is all just an educated guess, but as a plausibility check it can inform people if the map reflects the actual situation on the ground.