Highlights
∗ Across 31 systematically identified national seroprevalence studies in the pre-vaccination era, the median infection fatality rate of COVID-19 was estimated to be 0.034% for people aged 0–59 years people and 0.095% for those aged 0–69 years.
∗ The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years.
∗ At a global level, pre-vaccination IFR may have been as low as 0.03% and 0.07% for 0–59 and 0–69 year old people, respectively.
∗ These IFR estimates in non-elderly populations are lower than previous calculations had suggested.
Seroprevalence
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Across 31 systematically identified national seroprevalence studies in the pre-vaccination era, the median infection fatality rate of COVID-19 was estimated to be 0.035% for people aged 0-59 years people and 0.095% for those aged 0-69 years.
The median IFR was
* 0.0003% at 0-19 years
* 0.003% at 20-29 years
* 0.011% at 30-39 years
* 0.035% at 40-49 years
* 0.129% at 50-59 years
* and 0.501% at 60-69 years.At a global level, pre-vaccination IFR may have been as low as 0.03% and 0.07% for 0-59 and 0-69 year old people, respectively.
These IFR estimates in non-elderly populations are lower than previous calculations had suggested.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v1
Results
I included 61 studies (74 estimates) and eight preliminary national estimates. Seroprevalence estimates ranged from 0.02% to 53.40%. Infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 1.63%, corrected values from 0.00% to 1.54%. Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%): the rate was 0.09% in locations with COVID-19 population mortality rates less than the global average (< 118 deaths/million), 0.20% in locations with 118–500 COVID-19 deaths/million people and 0.57% in locations with > 500 COVID-19 deaths/million people. In people < 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%.
Conclusion
The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 can vary substantially across different locations and this may reflect differences in population age structure and case-mix of infected and deceased patients and other factors. The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic.