Strict Lower Bound on the COVID-19 Fatality Rate in Overwhelmed Healthcare Systems
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for COVID-19 is a poorly known, yet crucial, aspect of the disease. Counting only current deaths in a region and assuming everyone in that region is infected provides an absolute lower bound on the IFR. Using this estimator for New York City, Lombardy and Madrid yields strong bounds on the average IFR in overwhelmed health systems. Their combined 35, 152 deaths implies an IFR ≥ 0.14% averaged over 25.1 million people. This is the best-case scenario and conclusively demonstrates that COVID-19 is more deadly than influenza. The actual value of the average COVID-19 IFR is likely to be higher than this bound.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.22.20076026: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:One potential limitation of our analysis is that all three regions included have experienced some level of overwhelm of their healthcare systems, manifesting as shortages of some combination of beds, oxygen, ventilators, …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.22.20076026: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:One potential limitation of our analysis is that all three regions included have experienced some level of overwhelm of their healthcare systems, manifesting as shortages of some combination of beds, oxygen, ventilators, medicines and health care workers, leading to an increase in the computed IFR. How large of an effect this is is currently unknown. While the IFR for patients in healthcare systems that are not overwhelmed is very interesting, it is arguably more useful for governments to know the IFR in the overwhelmed case, since this is the likely scenario they will face should they decide to significantly relax social interventions such as lockdown. An important assumption in this work has been that travel to and from the affected regions has not significantly affected death tolls, i.e. that there has not been an in/outflux of travelers who later died. This could potentially happen if, e.g., the regions offered to help other affected regions by taking on large numbers of severely ill patients. However, the converse - infected people leaving to go to be in areas with less overwhelmed medical systems - seems more likely. As a result the lower bounds presented here seem fairly robust to this effect. Finally it is interesting to note that our lower bounds from the three worst-hit regions in Italy, Spain and the USA, namely (0.18%,0.11%,0.13%), are fairly similar. If the true population-averaged IFR is much higher, e.g. 1.5%, this would be a somewhat surprising co-incidence. O...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
