Coronavirus on track to kill 1.3 per cent of infected in US, ‘conservative’ study finds
- American researcher projects US death rate among symptomatic cases to be more than 10 times that of seasonal flu
- Estimate based on assumption that health services will not be squeezed further
In a paper published in the journal Health Affairs on Thursday, Anirban Basu, professor of health economics at the University of Washington, estimated that over time about 1.3 per cent of symptomatic Covid-19 patients in the United States would die from the disease, compared with 0.1 per cent of fatalities from seasonal flu.
Basu said the Covid-19 death rate would be higher because the coronavirus was more infectious and there was no vaccine or established treatment for the disease.
He also said that his projection may be “slightly conservative”, given that the actual number of infected people was not known.
Basu based his projections on analysis of nearly 41,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases from more than 110 counties across the country. However, it did not include figures for New York County – Manhattan – which has the highest number of cases and deaths in the US.