C
Chris Smith
Guest
- As the number of coronavirus deaths mounts in the US and other countries, researchers are trying to figure out the true fatality rate of COVID-19.
- Using available data from various studies that have attempted to offer accurate estimates, a study says the real mortality rate may be at 0.68% on average. That’s 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 infections.
- The actual mortality rate takes into account the COVID-19 cases that have not been diagnosed by a PCR test and is lower than the mortality rate calculated against the number of confirmed tests.
- Even at 0.68%, the COVID-19 mortality rate would be nearly seven times higher than the flu.
The novel coronavirus seemed like it might be a variation of the flu in the early days of the Wuhan epidemic. The more the virus spread and the more we learned about the pathogen, it became more apparent that COVID-19 isn’t anything like the flu. Not only does it spread a lot easier and faster, but it can cause a variety of serious complications that don’t appear in influenza cases. The new virus also kills a lot more people than the regular flu, even though some politicians claimed the two infectious diseases had similar mortality rates.
Seven months later, the coronavirus has killed nearly 616,000 people out of almost 15 million infections. That’s a fatality rate of 4.13%, according to the Coronavirus App website that’s been tracking COVID-19 for months. However, that number doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s unlikely that every COVID-19 death was reported as such, so the real death toll is likely higher. More importantly, the total number of cases registered worldwide isn’t truly the grand total. There have only been 15 million confirmed infectons, but as many as 10 times more people may be infected. That includes the asymptomatics and people who never get tested for COVID-19 but end up surviving. What that means is the fatality rate is actually much lower. Researchers think they know exactly how many people COVID-19 kills, statistically speaking, and the figure is still much higher than the flu.
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We might finally know how deadly the coronavirus is compared to the flu originally appeared on BGR.com on Tue, 21 Jul 2020 at 21:13:43 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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