It sounds harsh but being put on a ventilator is very invasive. If someone has a serious underlying health condition then they may have died anyway without the wuhan flu.
Big Louis
Numbers of Deaths is the only variable the scientists have to work with, and they use this figure to determine infection rates - Deaths being proportional to infection rates.
So those that die are either:
"Infected when they die" or "the virus is what killed them". "Infected when they die" means an underlying condition killed them, not the virus.
It turns out that very few people die as a consequence of the virus, most die from other underlying causes.
Whatever the cause of death we know they were all infected when they died, so we can use viral death numbers to indicate changes in infection rates - generally done over a 7 to 14 day period. We don't look for outlier numbers but to numbers clustered around the median.