  Understanding Covid-19 lethality and its variation from country to country is
essential for supporting governments in the choice of appropriate strategies.
Adopting correct indicators to monitor the lethality of the infection in the
course of the outbreak is a crucial issue. This works highlights how far the
time-dependent case fatality rate is a misleading indicator for estimating the
fatality in the course of the outbreak, even if our attention is only
restricted to the subset of confirmed cases. Our analysis proves that the final
case fatality ratio for several major European countries is bound to largely
exceed 10%. The largely discussed difference in the fatality ratio between
Italy and other major European countries, is to be mostly attributed (except
for the case of Germany) to the more advanced stage of the Italian epidemic.
