CFR

I’ve been enjoying browsing Covid plots on ourworldindata.org.  It’s a really convenient interface that allows you to plot data from various countries simultaneously.  I wish you could plot by state, but sadly, that’s not possible.

First, CFR.  When our former president said, we have more Covid cases because we’ve been testing more, I was extremely skeptical.  But it turns out he may have been right.  We can see that the CFR for the US dropped below that of the EU on March 9, 2020.  (I would guess that CFR is a pretty good proxy for how much you’re testing.  An alternative guess is that we had just as much Covid as Europe, but we have better medical care in the US, or that our hospitals had greater capacity.  I think it’s more likely we did a better job testing.)  You can see, however, how badly the US bungled testing during the critical early days.  What a debacle.

Zooming in, you can see our CFR continues to be substantially lower than most countries in Europe.  The US is sitting at 1.8% and the EU at 2.3%; that’s more than 25% higher.  The UK is 60% higher at 2.9%.  Let’s hope that’s not because the UK variant is more dangerous.

Looking at a log view of the CFR over time, a few things jump out at me.  First, we know Israel and the UAE have done a bang up job testing their citizens.  The CFR in the UAE is only 0.33%.  That suggests they’re catching most cases.  (Last I read, the fatality rate for Covid is thought to be somewhere south of 0.5%, though it depends on the health of the population.)   But a number of things are odd.  Australia’s CFR is up with the UK.  Why?  With so few cases, one would think they would have an extremely low CFR – that they would catch all cases, and that the CFR would reflect the actual fatality rate of the disease.  Are 3% of people who infected with Covid dying in Australia??? Or are they missing two thirds or more of the cases?  Either one seems concerning and unlikely.  What is going on?  What’s up with Mexico?  Why were things so bad in the UK early on?  The fact that the CFR for the UK has been so consistently high for a very long time, relative to other countries, suggests that perhaps, and hopefully, the UK variant is not worse than other variants in terms of fatality, and they just do a really poor job testing.  But a great job vaccinating.  Give credit where credit is due.

Currently, the US is sandwiched between South Korea and Japan, which is a good place to be.  But it probably means something very different, given how much higher our caseload is.  Unfortunately, I am very familiar with the Covid testing process at this point, as we’ve had several Covid tests in the family, and will have more still, guaranteed.  For example, when my parents visit, we’ll have to do a Covid test before the kids can return to school – despite a 7-day quarantine after their arrival.  This kind of nonsensical over-testing of people who we don’t have any reason to believe they have Covid probably skews our CFR artificially downwards.  I mean, if you test people who are fully vaccinated just because they had the temerity to cross a state border, you’re going to get a negative that nicely decreases your CFR.