From the Liveblog of
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Top US health official: Coronavirus mortality rate 1 percent or less
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleA top US health official says the overall mortality rate for the novel coronavirus was estimated at one percent or less, lower than previously thought, basing the new figure on a high number of unreported cases.
It came after US President Donald Trump was criticized for saying he believed the World Health Organization’s reported death rate of 3.4 percent to be “false,” based on a “hunch.”
Trump was invoking the fact that the WHO figure is based on reported cases only, and as such the true lethality of the disease may only be understood better over time — a point on which health experts agree.
“The best estimates now of the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1 percent and one percent,” Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health says at a news briefing.
“That’s lower than you heard probably in many reports, why is this? Number one is because many people don’t get sick and don’t get tested — this reflects the overseas experience — so probably for every case, there are at least two or three cases that are not in that denominator.
“It certainly could be higher than normal flu, it probably is, but it’s not likely in the range of two to three percent.”
The seasonal flu mortality rate is 0.1 to 0.15 percent, says Giroir.
— AFP
The Times of Israel Community.