A new study projects that coronavirus deaths in the United States may triple by the end of the year.
The study, conducted by Dr. Anirban Basu, the director of the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics Institute at the University of Washington’s School of Pharmacy, found that 1.3% of those infected with the novel coronavirus and who show symptoms die.
“COVID-19 infection is deadlier than flu — we can put that debate to rest,” Basu said in a press release from the University of Washington.
If the study’s findings about COVID-19’s fatality rate are accurate, the U.S. could see between 350,000 and 1.2 million deaths. The number could potentially move higher should infection rates increase with states continuing their economic reopenings. The study, which Basu notes is simply a forecast rather than a prediction, estimates approximately 20% of the U.S. population becoming infected with the virus.
“This is a staggering number, which can only be brought down with sound public health measures,” Basu said of the study published in the Journal of Health Affairs.
More than 4.86 million people have tested positive for the coronavirus globally. Of those, more than 321,000 have died from it, and more than 1.66 million have recovered.
The U.S. has seen at least 1.5 million confirmed cases, with more than 91,000 deaths and nearly 283,000 reported recoveries. More than 11.8 million people have been tested for the virus, according to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
The novel coronavirus is believed to have originated in Wuhan, China, late last year. The World Health Organization’s investigative report in February concluded that “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source as many reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.” However, reports in mid-April said U.S. officials are increasingly considering the possibility that the outbreak instead began in a Wuhan laboratory.
In early 2020, members of the U.S. intelligence community reportedly informed Trump that China was lying about the seriousness of the virus, which has since infected more than 4.16 million people worldwide. Officials informed the president that China “appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak” and was “not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”
Evidence has indicated that China also misled the WHO about the severity of COVID-19 to prevent investigations in Wuhan, where the first case of the coronavirus was reported, and blocked foreign medical health experts from assisting the containment of the disease. One study indicated that if China hadn’t misled the world about the virus’s severity, the coronavirus would have been significantly less widespread.
