COVID-19 death rate has dropped 30% since April, study finds

By Deena Beasley

(Reuters) – The likelihood of a coronavirus infection to prove fatal has fallen by nearly a third since April due to improved treatment, researchers from the Measurement and Evaluation Institute said on Thursday. University of Washington Health (IHME).

In the United States, COVID-19 now kills around 0.6% of people infected with the virus, up from around 0.9% at the start of the pandemic, IHME director Dr Christopher Murray told Reuters .

He said the statistics reflect that doctors have found better ways to care for patients, including the use of blood thinners and oxygen support. Effective treatments, such as the generic steroid dexamethasone, have also been identified.

Experts have struggled to accurately measure a crucial metric in the pandemic: the death rate, or the percentage of people infected with the pathogen who are likely to die. The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that many infected people have no symptoms and are never identified.

The IHME stated that it used an infection mortality rate (IFR) derived from surveys after taking into account age. Older people are at a much higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than younger people.

“We know that risk is deeply related to age. For each year of age, the risk of death increases by 9%,” Murray said.

The Seattle Institute, an influential source of COVID-19 forecasts, said it had also determined that the death rate from COVID-19 was worse in communities with high levels of obesity.

The group said it has now moved to a time-varying IFR – down from the first pandemic wave in March and April by about 0.19% per day until early September.

It also varies from place to place depending on the prevalence of obesity and continues to vary depending on the age distribution of the population.

The IHME said its analysis of age-standardized death rates from more than 300 surveys suggests a 30% drop since March / April.

Despite this positive trend, infections and hospitalizations have increased across the country in recent weeks. The group said its modeling suggested 439,000 cumulative deaths in the United States by March 1 and a peak in daily deaths in mid-January at 2,200.

(Reporting by Deena Beasley; Editing by Bill Berkrot)