I’m seeing this chart getting spread around a lot on Facebook and want to discuss it and the accompanying text a bit.
Here is the text:
“This is the TRUTH! Everything else is a lie! No matter what anyone says…death rate was, and will always be less than 1% chance! So we shut down economy for a virus with a 99.9% recovery rate? And it’s a known fact that a large amount of these deaths weren’t even from covid19. In fact, I still stand firm on no one under age of 19 dying from it! And no, don’t tell me about the 4 kids under age 19 that they claimed have died from covid…if you actually read the articles, you’ll see they aren’t from covid19. Have a great day people, and wake up please!!”
And the chart (which someone saved if a lossy file format, ugh):
First, I see nothing wrong with the actual numbers here. Someone obviously dumped things into a spreadsheet and did a few calculations. What is VERY wrong are some of the column labels especially the last one. That is the odds of not having died from COVID-19, YET. The percentage from which it was determined is the percentage of people that have already died from COVID-19. If you’re reading this you are 100% not in that category. We will not know the odds of dying from COVID-19 for decades.
Second, this is NOT the death rate or the survival rate, at least not how one would typically define them. If it were the survival rate, then the chances of surviving, say, setting a grenade off in your mouth would be very very high.
The real death rate is a very tricky thing to calculate even for things like pneumonia because not everyone that has it reports to someone that they do. What we know very clearly is that if you wind up going to the hospital with pneumonia you have about a 95% chance of surviving it (or a 5% chance of dying from it). From what I can calculate based on hospitalizations, the death/mortality rate of COVID-19 is higher than that of pneumonia, roughly twice that. But that’s if you go to the hospital. Maybe this is a virus that is devastating to some people and so the percentage of people that have it going to the hospital is much less than the percentage of people going to the hospital with pneumonia. We just don’t know.
If we were to take the data provided here, and let’s use Michigan (for fun) as the example. First you need to assume what percentage of the population will eventually get the virus. This will depend a lot on when a vaccine is available. However, let’s say 10% in the next, say, two years. If that is the case then about 1 million people will get it. So we take that total cases number and make it 1 million. Now it looks like about 10% of those in Michigan reported to have it have died. I’m guessing that number is more like 2% including all unreported cases. So, let’s say 2% of those 1 million people die. That comes out to be 20,000 people, or about 0.2% of the total population. You can look at that percentage as good or bad. But it’s a lot when you compare it to other ways of dying.
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