COVID-19: Down the Rabbit Hole of Death Rate Calculations - Part 1

Note: This was written on June 24th, Today is July 21. 

I have been away from this blog for a bit. Retired and changed career paths. I started writing again on this blog on June 17th to help me understand why my YouTube feeds we starting to show videos that were learned people arguing against social distancing and lock down, basically stating that the virus is just going to "poof" and be gone.

These video recommendations were showing up at the same time we were seeing this in the US:

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I was eight draft posts in when I kept getting bogged down on the mortality rate for COVID-19. Prior to these videos showing up I was getting some pretty mathematical - science based videos recommended. In particular this one got me thinking about the death rate for COVID-19.

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If the death rate is "ACTUALLY 20%", then why does the CDC state it is 0.26%?

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Now you can see by that USA Today headline that there is some disagreement with that. NPR address this and cites a paper titled "A systematic review and meta-analysis of published research data on COVID-19 infection-fatality rates."

Conclusion Based on a systematic review and meta-analysis of published evidence on COVID-19 until May, 2020, the IFR of the disease across populations is 0.64% (0.50-0.78%). 

The IFR -  infection-fatality rate - this meta analysis calculated is 0.67%. What is an IFR?

IFR is the ratio of deaths divided by the number of actual infections with SARS-CoV-2. (source)

The term infection fatality rate (IFR) also applies to infectious disease outbreaks, and represents the proportion of deaths among all the infected individuals. It is closely related to the CFR, but attempts to additionally account for all asymptomatic and un-diagnosed infections. (source)

That last one brings in another term, Case Fatality Rate (CFR).

The proportion of deaths from a certain disease compared to the total number of people diagnosed with the disease for a certain period of time. (source)

According to that cited Wikipedia article:

The IFR differs from the CFR in that it aims to estimate the fatality rate in all those with infection: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group).

Not being good at math has always been a downfall for me. I may not be good at it, but I am good enough to do back-of-the-envelope calculations.

When I look at the numbers for the US and elsewhere, the number of reported deaths to the number of reported cases is far greater than 0.26%, far greater than 0.67%, but not as high as 20% either.

So what is it actually, what number should we be looking at when we try to make a determination on how much worry we should have, or for our government officials, what policies and prohibitions should be put in place?

Enter the rabbit hole of deaths from COVID-19

On to Part 2