Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 has disrupted the life of billions of people around the world since the first outbreak was officially declared in China at the beginning of 2020. Yet, important questions such as how deadly it is or its degree of spread within different countries remain unanswered. In this work, we exploit the 'universal' increase of the mortality rate with age observed in different countries since the beginning of their respective outbreaks, combined with the results of the antibody prevalence tests in the population of Spain, to unveil both unknowns. We test these results with an analogous antibody rate survey in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland, showing a good agreement. We also argue that the official number of deaths over 70 years old might be importantly underestimated in most of the countries, and we use the comparison between the official records with the number of deaths mentioning COVID-19 in the death certificates to quantify by how much. Using this information, we estimate the infection fatality ratio (IFR) for the different age segments and the fraction of the population infected in different countries assuming a uniform exposure to the virus in all age segments. We also give estimations for the non-uniform IFR using the sero-epidemiological results of Spain, showing a very similar increase of the fatality ratio with age. Only for Spain, we estimate the probability (if infected) of being identified as a case, being hospitalized or admitted in the intensive care units as function of age. In general, we observe a nearly exponential increase of the fatality ratio with age, which anticipates large differences in total IFR in countries with different demographic distributions, with numbers that range from 1.82% in Italy, to 0.62% in China or even 0.14% in middle Africa.
Highlights
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has quickly spread around the world since its first notice in December of 2019
The under-counting of deaths comes from mainly two sources: (i) only the deaths that can be directly linked to COVID-19 are included in the official counting and (ii) countries mostly count the deaths occurred within hospital facilities in the statistics
We have studied the scaling of the cumulative number of deaths related to COVID-19 with age in different countries
Summary
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has quickly spread around the world since its first notice in December of 2019. The pandemic of the disease caused by this virus, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), at the moment of this writing, has claimed more than 400 thousand lives. Many countries in the world have declared different levels of population confinement measures to try to minimize the number of new infections and to prevent the collapse of their respective health systems. As the first wave of the outbreak. A scaling approach to estimate the age-dependent COVID-19 infection fatality ratio from incomplete data collected and freely available at https://dc-covid. A scaling approach to estimate the age-dependent COVID-19 infection fatality ratio from incomplete data collected and freely available at https://dc-covid. site.ined.fr/fr/donnees/ and https://github.com/ datadista/datasets/tree/master/COVID%2019
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