Understanding and Interpretation of Case Fatality Rate of Coronavirus Disease 2019
Case fatality rate (CFR) is the proportion of the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed patients of a disease, which has been used to assess and compare the severity of the epidemic between countries. The rates can also be used to assess the healthcare capacity in response to the outbreak. To date, there appear to be wide variations in CFR of COVID 19 among countries (Fig. 1) The current CFR in Korea is 1.3% (120 deaths out of 9,037 confirmed cases) as of March 25, 2020,2 while the CFRs are 9.5% in Italy, 7.9% in Iran, 6.6% in Spain, and 4.0% in China.1
Journal of Korean medical science