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.
Overall, the US has more than 1.3 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus, of whom roughly 80,000 have died.
US President Donald Trump said last week that the US was comparable to Germany in terms of controlling the pandemic.
“We’re very close to Germany … They have a very low mortality rate like we do. We have a low mortality rate also,” Trump said on Thursday.
As of Monday, the ratio of deaths to confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany was 4.4 per cent, compared to 5.98 per cent in the US. Belgium had the highest case fatality ratio at 16 per cent, followed by France at 14.9 per cent and Britain with 14.5 per cent.
Basu said his study assumed that the existing supply of health care services, including hospital beds, ventilators, and access to health providers, would continue in the future – factors that could affect deaths.
“Constraints in the supply of health care services could surely increase infection fatality rate and the overall fatality rates,” he said.
“[But] with mitigation strategies, the death toll will be lower.”
Basu said the overall fatality rate would fall over time as more patients recovered and asymptomatic carriers were factored in. The study is based on publicly reported data from Johns Hopkins University and The New York Times.
Basu’s projections and the present fatality rates appear to be below the global case fatality ratio for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, which the World Health Organisation put at 11 per cent at the end of the 2002-03 epidemic. At that time the WHO stressed that death rates changed as the disease progressed.
“While an epidemic is still evolving, only some of the individuals affected by the disease will have died or recovered,” it said.
“Only at the end of an epidemic can an absolute value be calculated, taking into account total deaths, total recoveries and people lost to follow-up.”
