The Coronavirus Case Fatality Rate is Not the Same as the Infection Fatality Rate

You need to know the difference to really understand how good we are at treating this disease.

As of this writing (7/30/2020), there have been 4.4 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US, and 151,000 deaths, for a case-fatality rate of 3.5%.

Case fatality-rates by country

If you were to rank the countries of the world with respect to case fatality rate you’d find the US doing ok — about on par with Germany, and Brazil. Way better than Italy, and worse than New Zealand and Australia, for instance. This is not to say we are containing the virus well, just that among those who get it, the chance of survival is about as good here as those other countries.

But there are two big problems with the case-fatality rate metric, problems this paper, appearing in PLOS Medicine, attempts to solve.