There’s widespread opinion some governments overreacted to the COVID threat, and imposed unnecessary restrictions. Today we explore the question of what really happened, and discover the answer is by no means clear. We really only know the low end of how likely we were to die from COVID during the pandemic. In other words it could actually be higher.
Gauging How Likely We Were to Die from COVID
Our World in Data (see link below) faithfully reports on what governments tell it. And they in turn can only report what they know. Therefore, the number of COVID cases (and deaths) is only the quantity they are sure of. This in turn means the case fatality rate is likely to be more of a trend than a fact.
But statisticians have another metric, in the form of excess deaths they can use. However, once again the accuracy of the number depends on the completeness of the data governments have available. Thus the excess death rate is not an accurate indication of how likely we were to die from COVID either. But it does show that the overall death rate increased during the pandemic.
The excess death date is therefore only a crude head count of how many more people may have died from COVID in a particular period. All it actually proves is that more people died during the pandemic than we might otherwise have expected. Therefore, to get a better idea of the actual death rate we have to look elsewhere.
The Case Fatality Rate Is Our Best Guess
The COVID hospital case fatality rate tells us how many actual people who had the disease, actually died from it under medical care. Hence we are dealing with two variables with which we have more confidence. However, this rate varies by time, place and the quality of medical treatment. Therefore we can’t really say we know for sure the actual risk we faced.
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