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Dr Gérald Kierzek (Medical Director)
Three years after the start of the pandemic, an analysis carried out on 38 different national studies tells us today that Covid-19 is associated with a relatively low fatality rate. And much more than we imagined when it arrived.
Have we overestimated the threat of Covid? Probably. The idea is not to relay a conspiracy theory, but to expose the results of a vast study by Stanford University, carried out in 38 countries 3 years after the start of the pandemic.
A very low fatality rate before the age of 60
American and European researchers have studied the “Infection fatality rate, stratified by age of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population” before the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines. A rate that was found after analysis to be as low as 0.03% and 0.07% for people aged 0-59 and 0-69, respectively, reports the document.Lower estimates than previous calculations had suggested.
In other words: 99.97% of people under the age of 60 who contracted COVID-19 survived. Add people in their 60s to the cohort, and survival rates still remain solid at 99.93%. In detail, according to the age groups, the fatality rate is as follows:
- 0-19 years: 0.0003%
- 20-29 years old: 0.002%
- 30-39 years: 0.11%
- 40-49 years: 0.035%
- 50-59 years: 0.123%
- 60-69 years: 0.506%
On average, this means that only five deaths would occur among a thousand infected sixties. The current analysis also highlights that the case fatality rate is much lower in younger populations than previously suggested. She thus asserts: “These covid lethality figures are slightly higher among 0-69 year olds than seasonal flu deaths (over the three years before covid). They remain lower than flu, however, when only people under 60 are taken “.
The researchers also found that case fatality rates were higher in men than in women, and that people with certain underlying conditions, such as diabetes, had a higher risk of death from COVID infection. -19.
The difference between case fatality and mortality
Mortality rate refers to the percentage of deaths relative to the number of individuals in a given population in a given time period. The fatality rate does not relate to an entire population but only to a portion of it, namely those infected and therefore carriers of the disease in question. It is therefore more precise to give the number of victims.
“A study that confirms what we see in the field”
For Dr. Kierzek, emergency doctor and medical director of Doctissimo, this large study conducted on millions of data only confirms what is observed in the field.
“We can clearly see that in an age group without pathology, in the under 65s, when there are no risk factors, the lethality is extremely low. Hence the concept of “syndemic” to qualify the role of SARS-Cov2. Covid-19 is more of an accelerator of pathology and/or old age than a threat in itself. This puts into perspective everything that we may have said or thought during the crisis, when we were talking about very high mortality rates.
These results underline the importance of targeting prevention policies towards groups at risk, such as the elderly and people with underlying diseases.