# How to best account for population sizes in disease outbreaks

Say one has the fatality and survivor rates of a pathogen in terms of geographical location (e.g., the latest data on the MERS-CoV).

France                      2 (1)
Italy                       3 (0)
Jordan                      2 (2)
Qatar                       2 (0)
Saudi Arabia               49 (32)
Tunisia                     2 (0)
United Kingdom (UK)         3 (2)
United Arab Emirates (UAE)  1 (1)
______________________________________
Total                      64 (38)


The total fatality rate is ~59%. However, I am not sure that this is a good measure: the rate for Saudi Arabia is ~65%, while the smaller cases have rates of 0 to 100%.

My thoughts are that the size of the outbreak should weight the outbreak's impact on the overall rate. However, I don't think averaging the individual rates would be correct. Is there a more appropriate measure that would allow me to take the size of the outbreak into account when calculating the overall impact?