COVID-19: Mortality rate (in time) An Analysis of Publicly Available Data from 11 Countries to Calculate the Mortality Rate of COVID-19

Abstract

In December 2019, a new virus, COVID-19, initially found in China, started spreading worldwide, resulting in a severe pandemic with 82 million confirmed infections at the end of 2020 and 288 million at the end of 2021. With 5.4 million reported deaths due to COVID-19 at the end of 2021, the apparent mortality rate is 2%, but the general agreement is that the reported numbers are incomplete. An analysis was made on the publicly available COVID-19 data from eleven countries (8 in Europe, 2 in North America and 1 in Africa) to obtain a mortality rate for COVID-19. The data from these countries also contained information about hospital admissions and were partly available in graphics, allowing the data to be downloaded. The size of the population varied from 5 million (Norway) to more than 300 million (USA). Data from an investigation of Sanquin, the Dutch blood bank, and the Belgian Red Cross on the presence of antibodies for the virus in their blood donors were used to estimate the number of infected people at the start of the pandemic. This estimate was combined with the number of hospital admissions to obtain a hospitalization rate. The resulting hospitalization rates for The Netherlands and Belgium were 1.49 % and 2.23 %, respectively. The hospitalization rates were used to calculate the total number of infected people during the pandemic, but analysis showed that the calculation is only valid until June 2021. Using the Dutch and Belgian hospitalization rates, the available data from The Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom showed that COVID-19 mortality rates of 1.2% at the start of the pandemic decreased to 0.4 % in the spring of 2021. The resulting cumulative mortality rate in July 2021 showed agreement, within the uncertainty, for Germany, France, Switzerland, USA, Canada and South Africa, but with dependence on the use of the hospitalization rate. The mortality rate was below the uncertainty band in smaller countries like Denmark and Norway.