on fatality rate

[mikkokotila]

It appears that the fatality rate topic can be broken down as follows:

• infectious fatality rate
• case fatality rate
• hospitalized fatality rate
• ICU (non-ventilated) fatality rate
• ICU (non-invasive ventilated) fatality rate
• ICU (invasive ventilated) fatality rate

At the moment, our understanding based on eye-witness accounts is that the difference between standard ICU admission and invasive ventilated is dramatic. If the overall ICU mortality rate is 50%, it's safe to assume that up until invasive ventilated, it's much lower. As little as 20% to 0% of invasive ventilation patients survive.

It seems that the only reasonable way at the moment to get a total fatality rate (from infections) is by randomly sampling a population in a hotspot, and then following those individuals and see how many die.

One curiosity here is that it seems that there might be a connection between higher case fatality rate, and the prevalence of infections. Which does not make sense intuitively?! We have not analyzed this, but it does seem that in places where there is a very high rate of positives vs. all tested, there is also a higher CFR. At first we thought it would be a capacity and quality of care issue (arising from capacity becoming close to full), but places such as NYC and NJ where capacity did not become an issue also seem to follow this trend.