3 ms·
It looks like your spreadsheet divides deaths on a given date by (confirmed and estimated) cases on that same date? This will bias your estimate downward. There
by retsibsi 6y ago
It looks like your spreadsheet divides deaths on a given date by (confirmed and estimated) cases on that same date? This will bias your estimate downward. There is a significant lag between diagnosis and death (and even more so between infection and death -- which of these is relevant depends on how you are estimating unreported cases), but you're implicitly assuming that 100% of unresolved cases will end in recovery.
- marcell 6y agoYou are correct, deaths lag a bit, as does reporting of the deaths, which downward biases the IFR. Antibodies also lag before they show up in the serology tests, which upward biases the IFR. But broadly, the studies I've cited largely back up the CDC's estimate of 0.4% IFR. Some of them have methodology in the papers themselves which give similar numbers, and I encourage you to read the raw data. But an IFR close to the flu is not at all surprising. Covid is a respiratory infection. It kills the same way the flu kills (eg. pneumonia), so you'd naively expect them to have similar fatality rates and outcomes, and they do.