The rate at which COVID-19 kills the people who get infected with it is one of the biggest unanswered questions of the global pandemic.
This is an excerpt from Second Opinion, a weekly roundup of eclectic and under-the-radar health and medical science news emailed to subscribers every Saturday morning. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.
The rate at which COVID-19 kills the people who get infected with it is one of the biggest unanswered questions of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Fatality rates appear to vary dramatically between countries around the world, anywhere from 0.5 to 10 per cent of cases, and experts say the true answer lies somewhere in the middle.
In early March, before the number of reported cases entered the hundreds of thousands and the death toll from the disease spiked, the World Health Organization released an estimated case fatality rate.
“Globally, about 3.4 per cent of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on March 3. “By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than one per cent of those infected.”
That number was determined by using a simple mathematical formula — the number of confirmed deaths divided by the number of reported cases.
At the time, there were 90,893 reported cases of COVID-19 around the world and 3,110 deaths.
But the number of cases is now more than five times what it was then — with more than 500,000 cases and 25,000 deaths worldwide — putting the current global case fatality rate at just over 4.5 per cent.
Why is it different in every country?
The global case fatality rate is constantly in flux for a variety of different reasons, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the virus is more deadly in any one region of the world.
The onset of outbreaks in different countries, the accuracy of their reporting, backlogs in testing, the age of their population and the effectiveness of containment measures taken to stop it from overwhelming health care systems all contribute to a varying rate.
Among countries that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic — Iran has seen a case fatality rate of more than seven per cent, Spain over 7.5 per cent and Italy above 10 per cent.
Yet other countries have fared far better given the circumstances.
South Korea and the U.S. both have a case fatality rate of about 1.5 per cent, while Germany currently sits at just 0.5 per cent.
Chief public health officer Theresa Tam said Thursday that six per cent of Canadians who contract COVID-19 are hospitalized, 2.5 per cent require critical care, and Canada has a case fatality rate of about one per cent.
“The fact that Canada’s fatality rate is at one per cent indicates that the health care system is not overwhelmed,” she said. “But these fatalities could be reduced further by preventing illness in our most vulnerable populations.”
Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian doctor and epidemiologist who l