More Thoughts on Computing the COVID-19 Fatality Rate
By Andrew C. McCarthy
March 27, 2020 6:30 AM
It’s based on decisions about whom to include or exclude, which are often conjecture.
On the Corner last week, I groused a bit about the difficulty of tracking the coronavirus fatality rate. It appeared to be hovering at a bit over 1 percent in the United States. But those appearances can be deceiving.
The elusiveness, I noted, was evident from an observation by Anthony Fauci, the esteemed immunologist of the National Institutes of Health and President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in late February, Dr. Fauci hypothesized that the fatality rate may be “considerably less than 1%†because many people who are infected experience either no symptoms or very mild symptoms and therefore do not report. The fatality-rate statistics are skewed toward the people who do report.
The question naturally arises: How much less than 1 percent could the fatality rate be?
More specifically, could the fatality rate for the coronavirus disease that sprang from China late last year (as our Jim Geraghty has comprehensively documented) approach a figure as low as the fatality rate for influenza? The question is important. President Trump frequently touts a comparison of the new coronavirus to flu. Americans longing to return to a semblance of normalcy — understandably so, given the gargantuan ruin the lockdown is causing — complain that closing the country due to coronavirus is overkill, since we don’t do it for flu.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-fatality-rate-computing-difficult/#slide-1
