Even though the virus is killing a small percentage of infected people, it still adds up to a large number of deaths: As of Aug. 31, the virus had infected more than 25 million worldwide and killed 847,000.
The good news: COVID-19 hasn’t proven to be as deadly as first feared, when some early projections suggested as many as one in four infected people would die.
In addition, election-year politics have played an enormous role in communicating the risk of COVID-19. Democrats and Republicans alike -- including President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee -- have cited conflicting information to bolster their campaigns.
This is good news, Adalja notes, because it means the virus is not mutating and becoming more lethal over time, which would have made developing treatments and a“It’s not that the disease is changing, it’s that we’re getting a better picture of the extent of infection,” explains Adalja, who is also a practicing infectious disease doctor. “From the very beginning, we had severity bias, where we were only seeing a fraction of those cases, which is going to increase the fatality rate.
The second measure is what’s called the “case fatality ratio,” or CFR, which estimates this proportion of deaths among identified and confirmed cases and is usually established only after a pandemic has ended by analyzing death records and laboratory-confirmed cases from hospitals and other sources. “They’re all related concepts, there are some nuances to them,” Adalja says. “But in general, what you want to know is: What are your chances of dying if you get infected with this? That’s the IFR.”
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