Thanks for your reply, but let me just respond to this. I was using an online calculator here (Y is what % of X) in which the CDC (Dec. 11) figure of 91 Million Estimated Total Infections when there were about 300,000 Covid-assigned deaths (figures are rounded) translated into a IFR of 0.33. I do not know of any updated IFR, which seems to be a secret.
Am I doing calculations correct (embarrassed to ask)?
The most recent data I have on hand is that of the CFR. As of April 25, 2021, 12:48 GMT we had the figure of 585,880 Covid-assigned deaths out of 32,789,653 positive Covid-19 cases, which figures (Y is what % of X) to be a CFR of 1.79% (CFR=Case Fatality Rate
Note that according to John Hopkins (last week) there were over 97 countries with a higher CFR than the USA.
We could also figure the CMR Crude Morality Rate (Covid-assigned deaths as a % of the total pop.)
The problem with using CDC’s number of deaths is that many of the reporting jurisdictions take weeks or months for their data to trickle out to CDC. They tell you this in the footnotes. Your calculation is fine, but the numbers going into it are an up-to-date estimate of infections with a very out-of-date number of deaths. That’s why I went to WoM’s numbers. When CDC’s data catches up, they tend to match up pretty closely. The difference is that CDC waits for the reporting jurisdiction to report them to CDC and WoM is getting them directly from the states themselves.
The CDC publishes IFR numbers in their pandemic planning scenarios (e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html). The problem is that after July last year, they stopped providing an overall number and began providing a breakdown of IFR by age group. Worse, the age groups changed multiple times. The last overall IFR I have is from the July 2020 update of the pandemic planning scenario document and it lists 0.65%. (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios-archive/planning-scenarios-2020-09-10.pdf)
If you take the age-based IFRs and combine them with US census data, you could probably tease out an overall IFR by weighting the numbers based on population group sizes, but that’s ugly and potentially has some error built in. Back in April/May/June I was seeing IFR published in various scientific journals as well. Nearly everything ranged within 0.02% (nominal) of the CDC IFR (e.g. range of 0.63% to 0.67%).
CFR is useful at a hospital level to understand how the hospital is doing with their patients versus others in the same region, but it becomes problematic to compare them too directly as there are major differences in testing and case diagnosis between different countries. That leads to wild swings in the underlying data and therefore - the output. If I’m looking to compare countries, I look at trends in the deaths per 1 million population. It has some more reliable inputs to it. The reason I say trends rather than the absolute value is that different countries may be in different stages of the pandemic. For example, COVID-19 hit India much later than the US and they’re just now hitting their second wave. So their deaths per 1 million population is currently low. But boy is that changing fast as their second wave is rising exponentially. The US has had four waves - the third being particularly bad - so we’re further down the line. But our trends in the past couple months have been great.
If we want a trend to look forward to, look no further than Israel. They’re about 1-2 months ahead of us in terms of population vaccination. They had 1 death yesterday. 1 death the day before. In the whole country. That’s down from almost 100 deaths a day at their peak. COVID-19 cases? 74 yesterday. Down from nearly 10,000 a day at their peak. I’d say they’re onto something.