Real COVID-19 Death Rate

In my last post, we did research on COVID-19 death rate based on the ratio between the number of deaths and the number of confirmed cases. However, this method is inherently flawed. Some infected people did not show up at a hospital or a testing station to get tested. As a result, the death rate is exaggerated.

Blood antibody tests on randomly sampled residents in Santa Clara, California in early April shows that the number of people infected is 55 to 85 times more than confirmed cases (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/santa-clara-coronavirus-infections-study/index.html). Thus, the real death rate for people who infected with coronavirus is between 0.1% and 0.17% which are similar to that of flu.

We use the following charts to illustrate two ways of calculating death rates.

COVID-19 Death Rate (Flawed) = Number of Deaths/ Number of Confirmed Cases

COVID-19 Death Rate (Real) = Number of Deaths/Number of Infected

As we can see, the chance of COVID-19 bullet hitting the bullseye, i.e., causing death, is much slimmer that appears based on confirmed cases alone.

Study on COVID-19 Annualized Death Rate

Probably this is the first time you see a chart like this. When people hear COVID-19 death rate for older people is high, they panic. We did research and published a paper on COVID-19 death rate( Study on COVID-19 Annualized Death Rate). Please notice the death rates for COVID-19 are "annualized". But we have to look at things in context. When COVID-19 death rate is annualized, it can be compared with other statistical data that are on annual basis. This is the key contribution of our research.

Please click the chart for sharper view.
Only when COVID-19 death rate is annualized, it can be compared with other statistical data that are on annual basis. This is the key contribution of our research. The following are the conclusions.

Conclusions

We propose a method to calculate the annualized death rate (ADR) related to COVID-19. Based on ADR related to COVID-19 and the 2018 death rate for the population of the United States, we gain the following insights:

Incremental annual death rates related to COVID-19 for age groups 45-54, 55-64, 65-74, 75-84 and 85+ are 0.4%, 1.2%, 2.2%, 3.1% and 6.0%， respectively.

Percentages of incremental annual death rates related to COVID-19 for age groups 45-54, 55-64, 65-74, 75-84 and 85+ are 100.9%, 131.8%, 124.4%, 69.8% and 44.5%, respectively.

If the herd immunity strategy is used in the United States, the incremental annual number of deaths related to COVID-19 for people equal to or older than 45 will be between 1.1 and 1.47 million.

The PDF file for the paper can be downloaded Study on COVID-19 Annualized Death Rate