Someone tried to tell me that the US had a 17% COVID mortality rate based purely off deaths / resolved cases.

GAC06 said:

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That person is an idiot

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Obviously

Did your guy get his numbers from this guy?

Honestly I think it's manipulating the calculations to get the desired reaction in order get internet clicks

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

That's technically true, in that there are 105,231 deaths and 527,995 recoveries based on worldometer data. Resolved is deaths plus recoveries. Deaths over resolved is about 17% (with rounding). So the math checks out.

But there are also 1,176,662 active cases, and that metric ignores active cases. We stil have 20k new cases a day, but we have expanded our testing and treatment.

Case fatality rate is #of deaths over # of cases, and that's a little under 6%. True infection fatality rate is likely significantly lower, perhaps even an order of magnitude lower.

Does that help?

The post above has the correct answer. There are a few different ways to calculate mortality rate. One is by the officially settled recovered versus dead which starts very high. As the virus goes to zero the different calculation methods converge to the same value.