‘COVID-19 isn’t as fatal as we thought’
New study estimates a death rate closer to flu — with fewer fatalities
A Stanford statistician says COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as we thought — but his calculations in a new study are already under attack from critics who say it overlooks the actual body count.
In an analysis, Dr. John Ioannidis places the fatality rate at 0.02%0.4%, far lower than the 1%-and-way-up numbers that once were bandied about — and much closer to the 0.1% death rate of the flu.
“While COVID-19 is a formidable threat, the fact that its IFR (infection fatality rate) is much lower than originally feared, is a welcome piece of evidence,” he wrote. “At a very broad, bird’s eye view level, worldwide the IFR of COVID-19
this season may be in the same ballpark as the IFR of influenza.”
The calculations don’t mean that the virus isn’t all that dangerous — because the number of lives lost from COVID-19, even under tough shelter restrictions, dwarfs the number of deaths from the flu.
“COVID death totals will be much, much greater than the flu,” said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at UC Irvine and an expert in flu pandemics. In three months, more than 93,500 Americans have died of COVID-19, and the number keeps climbing. During the typical six-month flu season, 24,000 to 62,000 people die.
Because there is an annual vaccine, “Not everyone is susceptible to the flu. Everyone is susceptible to COVID-19,” Noymer said. “These flu comparisons are missing the forest for the trees.”
Ioannidis wrote, “Determining death rates is challenging in the middle of a pandemic. Until recently, we’ve based our estimates on confirmed cases, which are easy to count, rather than infections, which are not. That’s overestimated the true lethality of the virus.”
The recent emergence of antibody testing — blood tests that show whether someone has been infected in the past, even without symptoms — makes it possible, finally, to ask: What is the real risk?
It’s a key question facing communities, which are braced for resurgent waves of infection that could last until there’s a vaccine.
Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology, long has argued that the lockdowns pose a bigger threat to public health than the COVID-19 virus. One of the authors of a pilloried Santa Clara County study, he repeatedly has questioned the prevailing wisdom of our current shelter-at-home strategy.
In his new analysis — a “preprint” that is posted online but not published in a scientific journal and not yet peer-reviewed — he selected 12 studies that measured seroprevalence, which show how many people in population samples have developed antibodies for the COVID-19 virus
He estimated the infection fatality rate by dividing the number of deaths among the people in those studies by the estimated number of people with antibodies.
The highest rates, from 0.25 to 0.4%, were in locations where infections occurred among elderly people or health care workers. The lowest rates were found in studies of blood donors, who tend to be younger and healthy.
Critics charge that he based his calculations on flawed studies. And they question the selection of studies — including deaths in healthy blood donors, for instance, but not including a recent Spanish seroprevalence study with an estimated IFR of 1% to 1.3% — triple the highest estimate in his review.
“A lot of the included studies had issues, and contradicted evidence from numerous places in the world, making the review itself a bit problematic,” said Gideon MeyerowitzKatz, an Australian epidemiologist who studies chronic disease.
UC Irvine’s Noymer agrees that the death rate is lower than initially estimated. That is to be expected, he said; faced with a growing case count and an unknown virus, we prepared for the worst.
What matters is that COVID-19 will kill more people in the U.S. this year than even our most severe flu season, he said.
“We shouldn’t fetishize a number when we can look out the window at an epidemic and see the real situation,” he said. “We have seen more COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. in three months — with a lockdown — than in the six-month flu season, without a lockdown.” Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 408-859-5306.