The Death Rate of Covid-19 in Developing Countries
Why the pandemic has hit low-income places so hard
Throughout the pandemic, one of the hardest things to pin down has been the death rate of Covid-19. It seems simple — you just take your number of deaths and divide by cases — but in practice, we know that there are many people who are asymptomatic and will never get tested as well as other problems in counting the true number of people who have had Covid-19.
To remedy this, we’ve conducted detailed, careful studies looking into the death rate of the disease, using a measure called the infection-fatality rate (IFR). This is an estimate of the likelihood that someone will die of Covid-19 if they get infected, by age, and we are pretty certain of the results at this point.
However, for some time there has been an apparent contradiction. If you look at the death figures in areas across the world, some of the lowest-income places actually appear to be doing really well at first glance. A good example is India, where the death rate from Covid-19 is far below what you’d expect given the extremely high rates of infection.
