A new study found the fatality rate associated with the coronavirus pandemic to be much lower than earlier estimates by top U.S. and global health officials.
The findings, published on Monday by the Lancet medical journal, estimate the fatality rate of those infected by the coronavirus is 0.66%, which is still higher than the seasonal flu death rate at 0.1%, but much lower than estimates proposed by world leaders as the COVID-19 outbreak spread across the globe.
The World Health Organization said in the beginning of March that the global death rate for the novel coronavirus was 3.4%.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said on March 4 that the virus could kill as many as 2% of those it infects. Fauci also noted the mortality rate could go down. “As a group, it’s going to depend completely on what the factor of asymptomatic cases are,” he said.
A week later, on March 11, German Chancellor Angela Merkel predicted 60% to 70% of Germans would become infected. And on Sunday, Fauci claimed between 100,000 and 200,000 people could die from the disease in the United States.
In their attempts to find the “true infection fatality rate,” researchers took into account milder forms of the disease that don’t require hospitalization and often go undetected as a result. The findings suggest that only 0.00161% of infected patients under the age of 9 will die as a result of the coronavirus.
The research also found that those infected with the coronavirus stay sick for longer, which places a strain on healthcare workers and facilities dealing with large numbers of patients.
There have been about 846,156 confirmed coronavirus cases around the world, 176,171 recoveries, and 41,494 deaths associated with complications from the virus, according to the latest reading by the Johns Hopkins University tracker. In the U.S., there have been 181,099 cases, 6,038 recoveries, and 3,606 deaths.
