What is the True Death Rate of COVID-19?

Looking at a complex question a year on

Pictured: The same header I used a year ago. There’s some meaning in that, although what exactly is anyone’s guess. Source: Pexels

A year ago, I spent a few weeks looking into the infection fatality rate of COVID-19. At the time, this was a minor side-project I could do in the extra time I had saved because I was working from home during lockdown and no longer had a 1.5-hour commute twice a day. It was a fascinating, complex problem, but also relatively easy to attempt to answer based on current best evidence at the time, because that consisted of only a few dozen scientific papers and preprints.

I did my first search in April, and found ~100 papers/preprints total. I checked again while writing this blog, and the exact same query now returns >5,000 results. Source: Nature

12 months on, and instead of a small side-project, the question has become something I spend most of my free time on. I’ve put in endless hours and late nights into trying to answer what at first seems like a very simple question: how likely are you to die if you catch COVID-19? In the process, I’ve published — with some amazing colleagues — two scientific papers on the question that have jointly been read 100,000s of times, cited by the CDC, WHO, EU, and others, and generally dedicated a very surprising amount of time to the whole idea.

So, a year on, let’s look at the question of the fatality rate of COVID-19, and what we’ve…