COVID-19 Mortality Rate

In a conversation I had with my mother last night, she pointed out that, according to politically right-of-center RealClearPolitics.com, our Centers for Disease Control estimates the death rate of COVID-19 at 0.004%, and she wonders how that jibes with the much higher figures I quote.  To which I respond:

That’s the mortality rate of the entire population of 7.8 billion people as of today.  The international death toll is just under 350,000 right now, so that’s 350,000/7,800,000,000 = 0.00004 or 0.004%.  I can’t argue that this isn’t a useful number to quote, especially if you’re trying to make the point that we’re over-reacting to the disease. To be fair, though, people are still dying from COVID-19, at the rate of one every 22 seconds, and there is an unknown but significant number of deaths from the disease that are not diagnosed.

Another useful number, IMO, is the mortality rate from actual resolved cases.  People may wish to know how likely they are to die from the disease if they’re diagnosed with it.  In the U.S., there is 433,447 resolved cases and 97,477 deaths, so that’s 22.5%.

There are many other ways of examining this as well, one of which is to take the number of fatalities in the U.S. 97,477, and divide it by the total number of confirmed cases, which is 1,670,000, which yields 5.9%.  The problem here, of course, is that the vast majority of the 1,670,000 cases have yet to be resolved, i.e., to either recover or die, thus this strikes me as meaningless.  A percentage of these people will eventually die; in fact, there is no reason to think that the 22.5% number above won’t apply to the as-yet-unresolved cases, which would bring the death toll here to 375,750.

A comparison of COVID-19 to the flu: about 5% to 20% of Americans get the flu each year, so let’s say that’s 30,000,000 total cases.  More than 200,000 people are hospitalized, and on average, and between 3,000 and 49,000 of them die.  Let’s say the average is 15,000  That is 0.05%.  This means that COVID-19 is approximately 45 times more lethal than the flu on a case-by-case basis.