Ross Clark Ross Clark

Stanford study suggests coronavirus might not be as deadly as flu

Getty images

One of the great unknowns of the Covid-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 per cent – which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number of deaths by the number of recorded cases, ignoring the large number of cases which are asymptomatic or otherwise go unrecorded. 

The Imperial College modelling, which has been so influential on the government, assumed an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9 per cent. This was used to compute the infamous prediction that 250,000 Britons would die unless the government abandoned its mitigation strategy and adopted instead a policy of suppressing the virus through lockdown. Imperial later revised its estimate of the IFR down to 0.66 per cent – although the 16 March paper which predicted 250,000 deaths was not updated.

In the past few weeks, a slew of serological studies estimating the prevalence of infection in the general population has become available. This has allowed professor John Ioannidis of Stanford university to work out the IFR in 12 different locations. 

They range between 0.02 per cent and 0.5 per cent – although Ioannidis has corrected those raw figures to take account of demographic balance and come up with estimates between 0.02 per cent and 0.4 per cent. The lowest estimates came from Kobe, Japan, found to have an IFR of 0.02 per cent and Oise in northern France, with an IFR of 0.04 per cent. The highest were in Geneva (a raw figure of 0.5 per cent) and Gangelt in Germany (0.28 per cent).

The usual caveats apply: most studies to detect the prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the general population remain unpublished, and have not yet been peer-reviewed.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in