COVID-19: What is the Actual Death Rate?

The U.S. death rate for the COVID-19 Coronavirus started off at 4% on March 8th, but the mortality rate, as more and more Americans are being tested, dipped to a record low of 1% on Sunday.

If you look at the chart below you will realize that with each passing day there is a clear dip in the fatality numbers. In fact, the current numbers still don’t tell us the whole story, as hospitals and urgent care clinics continue to turn potential COVID-19 victims away on a daily basis due to officials only concentrating on the seriously ill. That means the current mortality rate is SIGNIFICANTLY lower if you factor in ALL OF THE CASES that are not being reported, especially the people who have the virus but are immune to symptoms. And so, what is the actual death rate of this virus?

A study from South Korea, which tested more people than any other country, has the death rate at 0.6%.
As you can see below, the death rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining on a daily basis

4.06% March 8 (22 deaths of 541 cases)
3.69% March 9 (26 of 704)
3.01% March 10 (30 of 994)
2.95% March 11 (38 of 1,295)
2.52% March 12 (42 of 1,695)
2.27% March 13 (49 of 2,247)
1.93% March 14 (57 of 2,954)
1.84% March 15 (68 of 3,680)
1.6% March 17 (116 of 7,301)
1.4% March 19 (161 of 11,329)
1.25% March 20 (237 of 18,845)
1.00% March 22 (396 of 38,167)

When all is said and done, and millions upon millions are infected, what will be the true mortality rate for this virus? Highly exaggerated figures have been flying about, most notably the highly irresponsible claim from the WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who spoke of 3.4%, but his figure was calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the number of officially confirmed cases. The problem is that when it comes to the COVID-19 virus, there will be hundreds of millions of people in the world who will turn out to have no symptoms whatsoever from the disease, even after getting it.

A recent study shows that more than 33% of people will be asymptomatic to the disease.

We know there are many more mild cases that do not get to hospital and are not being counted, which would bring the mortality rate significantly down. The UK’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, is one of those who believe the mortality rate will ultimately prove to be 1% or lower.

At the moment, due to a severe lack of testing around the world, there is a universal freakout over COVID-19 due to the 4.1% mortality rate (16,328 deaths out of 373,818 cases). It’s an unfair and very misleading number, considering that many poor countries that are affected cannot afford to test that many of its citizens and only rely on counting the most severe cases that come to the emergency room, which ultimately skews the overall number and further scares people into thinking this virus is deadlier than it actually is.

White House task force expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, a longtime director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, testified that COVID-19 could very well be ten times more lethal than the flu. The latter has about a 0.1 percent fatality rate, so that would mean the COVID-19 rate could ultimately be about 1 percent. Yet, Dr. Fauci, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, made the intriguing assumption that “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%,” if we assume that “the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases.”

There seems to be, as Dr. Fauci suggests, a very good chance that the fatality rate in the U.S. could drop significantly under 1 percent, once (a) testing is widely available throughout the nation and (b) more people with no symptoms or very mild cases inflate the “reported cases” category.

Of course, all of this data, although highly promising, cannot minimize the fact that COVID-19 is contagious and can spread like wildfire, easily impacting those most vulnerable to the disease (the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions). Continuing social distancing and the heightened protections set forth by world governments will ensure minimal deaths.