Mortality may vary from region to region depending on the level of medical care available to patients. In Hong Kong, the mortality rate cannot be accurately assessed yet because this epidemic is still evolving. Unfortunately, the mortality rate is still increasing. There are two different ways to compute the mortality rate - this can be based on all SARS patients or only based on the patients with a known outcome, i.e. being discharged. Based on numbers on April 27 - the mortality rate is 8.9% and 16.3% for the two methods respectively. The true value lies somewhere between these two figures.
Many of these patients who have died are elderly, had other chronic illnesses, sought treatment at relatively late stage of illness or had an unusually severe form of SARS.