CDC: COVID-19 Death Rate Far Lower Than Previously Thought

The federal government is finally admitting what many observers have suspected all along: The average American’s chances of dying from COVID-19 are extremely small. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest best estimate of the death rate for individuals with COVID-19 symptoms is just 0.26 percent, slightly higher than that of the seasonal flu.

The CDC offers five estimates in its latest “COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios,” which are “designed to help inform decisions by modelers and public health officials who utilize mathematical modeling.” Its “current best estimate” is that the symptomatic case fatality ratio (CFR) for all Americans is 0.4 percent and that 35 percent of those who get the virus are asymptomatic. Thus, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is 0.4 percent of the 65 percent who actually have symptoms, which comes to just 0.26 percent.

This is, of course, considerably lower than the CDC’s March forecast, which, assuming an IFR of 0.8 percent, called for up to 1.7 million deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. The Imperial College estimate of Dr. Neil Ferguson — whose computer code experts have called “totally unreliable” — assumed an IFR of 0.9 percent, leading to a forecast of as many as 2.2 million American deaths. State and local officials, acting on these projections, issued shelter-in-place orders, shuttered “nonessential” businesses, and otherwise made life miserable for the people they serve.