Scientists are still trying to understand the virus they call SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19, but as time goes by and more data is amassed, some numbers, such as the death rate from the disease are becoming clearer.
When the CDC put out its guidance last week, it estimated that 0.2 to 1% of people who become infected and symptomatic will die. The agency offered a “current best estimate” of 0.4%. The agency also gave a best estimate that 35% of people infected never develop symptoms. Those numbers when put together would produce an “infection fatality rate” of 0.26, which is lower than many of the estimates produced by scientists and modelers to date.
If the severity of COVID-19 has been significantly overestimated, and further research confirms this, critics of the national shutdown will cite this as evidence that the country overreacted to a virus that is not that much worse than seasonal influenza…
The lethality of the virus has been hard to estimate because of the lack of testing and the paucity of solid data on how many people have been infected. That data is now coming in, however, including a report by researchers at the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County health department, published in JAMA, that described a survey of Los Angeles County residents who were tested for antibodies to the virus. The authors estimated that about 4% of the population had been infected as of April 10 and 11.
Although the report did not offer an infection fatality rate, lead author Neeraj Sood, a professor of health policy at USC, said it would probably be 0.13% for people outside nursing homes and 0.26% — identical to the CDC best estimate — when people in nursing homes were included. No one in the survey lives in a nursing home. All of the volunteers tested were “community-dwelling individuals,” he said.
…An Imperial College model that in late March said 2.2 million people in the United States could eventually die if the country took no measures to halt viral transmission.
The White House coronavirus task force relied on that model and a number of others, including one from the University of Washington. When Trump extended the closure recommendations by 30 days on March 31, members of his task force revealed a forecast, based on many models. Even with social distancing and other mitigations, it showed, the coronavirus would kill between 100,000 and 240,000 people over some unspecified period of time.
That number was stunning. The death toll was still less than 4,000 nationally.
The forecast now looks well-founded, with hundreds of deaths added daily and a vaccine or reliable therapeutic treatment still probably far in the future… The decision by Trump to order an initial 15-day national shutdown came March 16, when the country had reported only 85 deaths, according to a Washington Post tally. Models — however imperfect and dependent upon assumptions that might be incorrect — gave political leaders and the public an accurate sense of the likely scale of the COVID-19 epidemic facing the nation…
One common misperception today is that scientists oppose the reopening of the economy. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a television interview Friday that if stay-at-home orders were imposed for long, it would cause “irreparable damage,” but he urged people to “please proceed with caution.”
Jeffrey Shaman, an influential epidemiologist at Columbia University, said that the health of the economy matters, and that the nation needs to restore economic activity in a way that keeps people safe. “We have to do both those things,” Shaman said. “We want a functioning economy, and we don’t want people getting sick.”
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, no once can predict the future, so the early models offered a very wide range of possibilities, including a higher COVID-19 death rate. So, it’s great news that 99.74% of people (and likely 99.87% of people outside of nursing homes) who encounter SARS-CoV-2 do not die from COVID-19. As more and more data gets add