Covid-19 crisis How serious can the pandemic be?
According to statistics from the World Health Organization, there were 30,879 deaths out of 663,740 infections around the world as at 29 March 2020. This implied a mortality rate of 4.6%.

Some people calculated that is the entire global population of 7.8 billion people become infected, the total deaths would be 351 million. If half of the population became infected, 175 million people would die.

Two prominent disease experts said that the death rate is inflated. The 663,740 people reported in the WHO statistics are the infected people who became sick. A larger number of people were infected but the infection was mild and they were not even aware about it. 

The expects do not have the data of how many people were infected that do not become sick. They think that it could be 5 to 10 times of the people that were sick.

If it is 10 times of the sick people, the death rate would drop to 0.4% rather than 4.5%. This is still a high mortality rate, but not as alarming as 10 times of that number. 

There is a way to find out. The scientist can take a representative sample of the population and test the percentage that were already infected. Perhaps the sample could be 10,000 people. It would be manageable to test this number than to test millions of people.

Based on this sample, the scientists can estimate the number of people were were infected and calculate the death rate from this larger number of infected people. 

They estimate that the death rate could fall to between 0.2% to 0.7%.

They quoted the random testing carried out in Iceland of people who are well and who are sick. The report is shown here. 

According to this research, about 6.3% were estimated to be infected. This works out to 23,000 people out of a population of 364,000. The WHO statistics reported 963 cases (i.e. people who are sick) and 2 deaths. 

You can compare the 963 cases with the 23,000 people. This means that, in Iceland, only 1 out of 24 infected people became sick and need to be treated. The other 23 infected people did not require treatment. 

If we take this factor of 24, the number of 175 million deaths (assuming the 50% of the global population is infected) will drop to 7 million. This is still a high number, but not as alarming as 175 million. It is 2.5 times the number of 3 million that die every year from pneumonia.

Tan Kin Lian


 

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