Case Fatality Rate Puns

It's been ten days since I posted this data. I've been watching it the whole time looking for the numbers to start to change, and I figured it's time to post an update now.

The wave has peaked in terms of cases, and deaths are climbing, but much less than previous waves.

You can see in terms of reported daily cases, this wave (so far) has dwarfed previous waves, while the deaths have remained relatively low.

We can have some confidence in the case numbers as tests per day have gone up, positive rates have gone down while the case numbers are crashing. It's a relief that while deaths are rising, they aren't shooting up like they did in previous waves.

That said, South Africa reported 21k cases yesterday and 75 deaths... and deaths for this wave are ramping up.

So while I would continue to say this wave is less severe, it's clear Omicron can and does kill people, even in a population with a great deal of prior immunity. It still isn't clear from these numbers the extent to which the apparent mildness of Omicron is from prior immunity, and how much is from the virus itself being less dangerous.

I would expect the death rate to be higher in Australia as we have an overall older population, and South Africa have already had >233k excess deaths during the pandemic (yes, that's enough to get into the herd immunity ballpark). It's quite reasonable, IMO, to suggest that most vulnerable, unvaccinated people in SA have already died. That is absolutely not the case in Australia.

I would still say that anyone planning to confront Omicron without preparing their immune system with a vaccine is taking a huge unnecessary risk.

CFR has stabilised at an historic low of about 0.29%

I expect this rolling average CFR to rise in the coming weeks, but I don't expect it to approach the spikes of previous waves.

The CFR data is interesting, to say the least. It's always a hit-and-miss measure, but throughout the pandemic, in every country and on every chart, it's overestimated the actual Infection Fatality Rate. So for it to be as "low" as 0.29% is encouraging.

That said, as always, a word of caution. Even if it stays at 0.29%, bear in mind that Australia added 8,625 cases yesterday and that nu

Since July 1st there have been 3,131 new cases of COVID-19 and 12 fatalities in Ottawa. That's a CFR of 0.38%. The CFR over the entire pandemic in Ottawa is 1.96% (603 fatalities from 30,812 confirmed infections) so this is a huge improvement.

Vaccines work!

These tables show hospitalisations / cases and deaths / cases, as defined in the Vaccine Surveillance Reports. In plain English, they show the chances of being hospitalised/dying if you test positive.

Double vaccinated means >=14 days since a second dose of a Covid vaccine.

Hospitalisations

Deaths

Overall, we seem to be seeing a slow but steady rise in hospitalisation/fatality rates amongst the double vaccinated over 50's.

Lag Sensitivity Analysis: Previously I've put a major caveat on this because the tables ignore any lag effects, but the following tables show the results of assuming 0, 1, 2 and 3 week lags between cases and hospitalisations/deaths in the week 39 report. (e.g. The 1 week lag entries show hospitalisations in the week 39 report divided by cases from the week 38 report) and it doesn't seem to cause any easily identifiable trend.

Hospitalisations

Deaths

Sources:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-surveillance-reports (thanks to /u/Timbo1994 for giving me t

From Dr. Eric Topol: https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1413537810296950786

"The new @PHE_Ukreport today https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001009/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_18.pdf

Good to see Delta's secondary attack rate (an indicator of transmissibility) has continued to drop and now similar to that of Alpha:"

https://preview.redd.it/pk8rdeui98a71.png?width=2016&format=png&auto=webp&s=92ff231913e7e9734e9f782612ef8bd60a4c3435

"Also the case fatality rate for Delta continues to lessen, 0.2% compared with 1.9% Alpha, predominantly due to younger people getting infected. There are NO data to suggest Delta is more deadly than prior virus strains.:"

https://preview.redd.it/q3mti1gn98a71.png?width=2862&format=png&auto=webp&s=38d2e999a87e5da08bc0344104c91b5838bbbd55

Delta causes fewer, not more, deaths than prior strains of COVID, at least in the data coming out of the UK and being explored today, from as recently as four days ago (which may be different than data in other places, but which is definitely accurate for the UK and other comparable countries).

USA:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254271/us-total-number-of-covid-cases-by-age-group/

I was actually a bit surprised when I calculated the CFR for USA, as it seemed quite high. We know chronic disease runs rampant, so let's also calculate the CFR for a healthier country, like Switzerland.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110092/coronavirus-covid-19-deaths-age-group-switzerland/

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JJwJhjIpYd_HR8sIU0T03mfkJfORU63AvfeK_QlwLzA (rows 823-830)

Now, for fun, let's also do a relative risk reduction per age group for Switzerland vs USA.

Risk reduction of ~90% for those aged under 60. Health probably plays a role in this reduction but I'm sure there are other confounding variables.

Anyways, let's discuss.

Every anti vaxxer I see and the ones destiny talks to always blurt out "COVID 99.99% survival reeeeeeee". Here is a simple website that shows the case fatality rate of COVID by country over the entire pandemic and they discuss the various ways of calculating fatality/mortality rates and how people can twist the numbers to their agenda, with sources.

https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-mortality-risk

Edit: not saying that case fatality rate is even a good indicator of your chances of dying if you get the infection as explained at this link. This link mostly says that we can't really calculate your true chance of dying if you get COVID

I'm looking for data on infections for different countries/geographic areas of the structure:

the specific country or area is not too important, as long as there are different locations I can compare against. I'm trying to compute case fatality rates for different groups.

Any hints are highly appreciated!

Ever since the MLHU had its issue with recovery data starting early January of this year, I've been tracking the age distribution of new Covid cases in London. As vaccines began to be administered, the proportion of people 80, 70, 60+ getting Covid have dropped substantially.

About a week ago, I saw someone here claim Covid has a 99.8% survival rate and were ripped apart for saying that. So I pulled the Ontario data to get case fatality rates by age. I again pulled the data today, and noticed that the case fatality rates in those 60+ have dropped anywhere from about 1/3 to 1/2. This makes sense, because we know that in the rare cases that vaccinated people do contract Covid, they tend to have less severe bouts. I would even suspect the case fatality rates will continue to drop as more and more people get vaccinated.

For what I'm about to present, I'm using the case fatality rates from the last week for those 60+, and the historic case fatality rates for those 0-59 (they've actually come down overall too, but they're small numbers and I'd rather rely on the larger sample size of one year than just one week, since these populations are less likely to have been vaccinated anyways).

As such, current case fatality rates by age are:

0-19: 0.004% (2 deaths, 52293 recoveries)

20-29: 0.02% (12 deaths, 74468 recoveries)

30-39: 0.04% (25 deaths, 56929 recoveries)

40-49: 0.14% (72 deaths, 50923 recoveries)

50-59: 0.49% (257 deaths, 51817 recoveries)

60-69: 1.51% (20 deaths, 1304 recoveries IN THE LAST WEEK)

70-79: 5.15% (30 deaths, 552 recoveries IN THE LAST WEEK)

80+: 14.53% (43 deaths, 253 recoveries IN THE LAST WEEK)

These are the Ontario figures. There's no reason to believe London would vary much from them. Where London would be unique is in the age distribution of those getting Covid.

Over the last week, we've had 871 new cases: 233 0-19, 265 20-29, 110 30-39, 78 40-49, 82 50-59, 75 60-69, 16 70-79, and 12 80+.

When you apply these cases to their respective case fatality rate, you will get an estimated 4.32 deaths of these 871 people. That's 0.5%. For a while back in January, we were seeing over 3 deaths per day, and now we're looking at 4.3 per WEEK. This is great news.

And there's every reason to believe these numbers will continue to come down. It seems as if vaccines are becoming more available every day. As such, the shift in what age groups are making up our new cases will continue to move towards younger demographics, who have l

Hindustan Times reports that "25% of those infected with black fungus in Chandigarh succumbed", which is much higher than the observed 1.3% case fatality rate for Covid-19.

For additional case and death statistics due to mucormycosis across India, see the "Mucormycosis Dashboard"

https://preview.redd.it/2g9xew0hxa771.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=15fafb96d7701059410c0de14a718667dc217adc

The Covid CFR (case fatalaity rate) is being reported as 1% or even 2% by some sources, but it seems that they're only dividing the number of deaths/number of cases.

This is the naive approach to put it nicely because the number of tested cases of covid is not the total cases. In the beginning, Italy was irresponsibly reporting 8% because they'd just be testing people who are already in the ER having trouble breathing.

This is a separate problem from claiming anyone who died with covid died of covid. So the problem is twofold, both on the numerator, and the denominator of the calculation.

A lot of my skepticism comes from these kinds of basic things not being considered. This is sometimes met with 'well you're not the expert' and although I'm not an epidimeologist, I do have some background in research and experimentalism, and how to handle data.....you know, the basics. Although I don't think one needs to even be an expert to see such a glaring mistake. So this kind of blind trust in the 'experts' further compounds my dismay.

These tables show hospitalisations / cases and deaths / cases, as defined in the Vaccine Surveillance Reports. In plain English, they show the chances of being hospitalised/dying if you test positive.

Double vaccinated means >=14 days since a second dose of a Covid vaccine.

Hospitalisations

Deaths

Last week I noted that we saw big drops in hospitalisation rates for over 50's. This week, those rates are back up again, making the previous weeks data look awfully like some weird 'blip'. However this week we're seeing significant falls in the death rates, which given deaths lag hospitalisations by about a week, would make sense if the previous hospitalisation data was correct. But I have no idea why there might have been a short-term drop in the rate of a postivie covid case progressing to more 'severe' outcomes.

As I said last week, somewhat doubting the overall utility of this, but I'll keep it going in a fairly low effort sort of fashion - it was always about long term trends, really. (Low effort this week slightly impaired by UKSHA deciding to change 80+ to >=80 with a unicode character for >= that broke my parser).

Lag Sensitivity Analysis: Previously I've put a major caveat on this because the tables ignore any lag effects; the following tables show the results of assuming 0, 1, 2, ..., 4 week lags between cases and hospitalisations/deaths in the week 42 report. (e.g. The 1 week lag entries show hospitalisations in the week 42 report divided by cases from the week 41 report). In general, this hasn't shown much of a trend, but you can see a couple of percentage points difference here - this is basically due to the recent rise in cas

These tables show hospitalisations / cases and deaths / cases, as defined in the Vaccine Surveillance Reports. In plain English, they show the chances of being hospitalised/dying if you test positive.

Double vaccinated means >=14 days since a second dose of a Covid vaccine.

Hospitalisations

Deaths

Lots of weirdness in these figures over the last 3 weeks. In weeks 37-40 there was a big drop in hospitalisation rates (for everyone over 40) that seems to have been a one-off blip with the last 2 weeks fairly stable. But now over the last 3 weeks we've seen reasonably sustained falls in death rates; the biggest falls (proportionately) are in the 50-69 age range so it doesn't look like it should be booster related. Honestly pretty mystified at this point.

I am somewhat doubting the overall utility of this analysis, but I'll keep it going in a fairly low effort sort of fashion - it was always about long term trends, really. (Low effort this week slightly impaired by UKSHA changing the report format again).

Lag Sensitivity Analysis: Previously I've put a major caveat on this because the tables ignore any lag effects; the following tables show the results of assuming 0, 1, 2, ..., 4 week lags between cases and hospitalisations/deaths in the week 43 report. (e.g. The 1 week lag entries show hospitalisations in the week 43 report divided by cases from the week 42 report). In general, this hasn't shown much of a trend, but you can see a couple of percentage points difference here - this is basically due to the noticable rise in cases. My understanding is that the hospitalisation/deaths given in the tables are matched by date of case (and so should not ha

These tables show hospitalisations / cases and deaths / cases, as defined in the Vaccine Surveillance Reports. In plain English, they show the chances of being hospitalised/dying if you test positive.

Double vaccinated means >=14 days since a second dose of a Covid vaccine.

Hospitalisations

Deaths

Note: previous versions of these tables only showed the most recent 5 weeks - this was a bug (I wanted to to restrict the lag analysis to the most recent 5 weeks but did it for everything) that I've now fixed.

As I posted previously, over the previous 3 reports we saw reasonably sustained falls in death rates; however, the latest report shows no real fall over the previous one. Given the fact each report spans 4 weeks, I'm now *somewhat* suspicious there was some kind of methodology/reporting change that slowly filtered through (e.g. a change from week 40 would affect 1 week of weeks 37-40 but all 4 weeks of 40-43). But it's just speculation.

I am somewhat doubting the overall utility of this analysis, but I'll keep it going in a fairly low effort sort of fashion - it was always about long term trends, really. (Low effort this week slightly impaired by UKSHA changing the report format