In Italy, about 10% of people known to be infected with coronavirus have died. In Germany, that figure is close to 0.5%. Here's what we know — and why scientists say fatality rates can look so confusing 👇
Coffins of deceased people stored in a warehouse near Bergamo — a city at the heart of Italy's coronavirus crisis — before being transported to another region for cremation.Piero Cruciatti/AFP via Getty Images
In Italy, about 10% of people known to be infected have died. In Iran and Spain, the case fatality rate is higher than 7%. But in South Korea and the U.S. it's less than 1.5%. And in Germany, the figure is close to 0.5%.The answer involves how many people are tested, the age of an infected population and factors such as whether the health care system is overwhelmed, scientists say.
That's what happened with West Nile virus, which appeared in the U.S. in 1999. At first, when scientists only knew of about a few dozen cases, it appeared the mortality rate was higher than 10%. But wider testing eventually found hundreds of thousands of people who'd been infected but never got sick enough to notice. Today, more than 3 million Americans have been infected and studies show that fewer than 1% become seriously ill.
A country's case fatality rate is simply the number of deaths divided by the number of infections . The problem is, both of these numbers may be unreliable.
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