A big drop in Covid-19 death rates
Hospitalized Covid-19 patients are much less likely to die than those in the early weeks of the pandemic, new research shows. Assessing the trend in mortality rates is difficult, because the people who are contracting the virus now tend to be younger, fitter, and healthier than those who were infected back in March and April, and therefore much more likely to survive. But a study of more than 5,000 hospitalized patients in New York City from March to August found that mortality dropped across all groups in that time period—even among seniors and those with underlying conditions such as obesity and diabetes. Admitted patients had a 25.6 percent chance of dying early in the pandemic; now it’s 7.6 percent. That’s a sharp improvement, but the death rate is still far higher than for many other common infectious diseases, including the flu. Another study from England on 21,000 hospitalized cases indicates similar declines across all groups. “Clearly, there’s been something [that’s] gone on that’s improved the risk of individuals who go into these settings with Covid-19,” author Bilal Mateen from the Alan Turing Institute in London tells NPR .org. Health-care workers have evidently gotten better at treating the disease—they now know how to react when a patient suffers blood clots or immune-system overreactions, and ventilators are used more sparingly. The increased use of masks could also be driving down mortality by shrinking the initial dose of virus that patients receive, and so lessening the severity of illness.