The CDC's New 'Best Estimate' Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%
That rate is much lower than the numbers used in the horrifying projections that shaped the government response to the epidemic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current "
best estimate" for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the
alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders.
The CDC offers the new estimates in its "
COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios," which are meant to guide hospital administrators in "assessing resource needs" and help policy makers "evaluate the potential effects of different community mitigation strategies." It says "the planning scenarios are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the Federal government."
The CDC's five scenarios include one based on "a current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." That scenario assumes a "basic reproduction number" of 2.5, meaning the average carrier can be expected to infect that number of people in a population with no immunity. It assumes an overall symptomatic case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.4 percent, roughly four times the
estimated CFR for the seasonal flu. The CDC estimates that the CFR for COVID-19 falls to 0.05 percent among people younger than 50 and rises to 1.3 percent among people 65 and older. For people in the middle (ages 50–64), the estimated CFR is 0.2 percent.
That "best estimate" scenario also assumes that 35 percent of infections are asymptomatic, meaning the total number of infections is more than 50 percent larger than the number of symptomatic cases. It therefore implies that the IFR is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent. By contrast, the projections that the CDC made in March, which
predicted that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19 without intervention, assumed an IFR of 0.8 percent. Around the same time, researchers at Imperial College produced a
worst-case scenario in which 2.2 million Americans died, based on an IFR of 0.9 percent.
Such projections had a
profound impact on policy makers in the United States and around the world. At the end of March, President Donald Trump, who has alternated between minimizing and exaggerating the threat posed by COVID-19,
warned that the United States could see "up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that" without aggressive control measures, including lockdowns.
entire article:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current "best estimate" for the fatality rate among Americans…
reason.com
Additional articles:
The data is based on five scenarios, including the best estimate for a mortality rate, which is 0.4% overall.
www.wcnc.com
http://ou-gz-suvcars.gunuj.com/rd?h...375847&utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral