Assessing the Age Specificity of Infection Fatality Rates for COVID-19: Meta-Analysis & Public Policy Implications, ,
NBER Working Paper No. 27597 This paper assesses the age specificity of the infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID-19. Our benchmark meta-regression synthesizes the age-specific IFRs from four recent large-scale seroprevalence studies conducted in Belgium, Geneva, Spain, and Sweden. The estimated IFR is close to zero for children and younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3 percent for ages 50-59, 1 percent for ages 60-69, 4 percent for ages 70-79, and 24 percent for ages 80 and above. We compare those predictions to the age-specific IFRs computed using recent seroprevalence studies of six U.S. geographical areas, three small-scale studies, and three countries (Iceland, New Zealand, and Republic of Korea) that have engaged in comprehensive tracking and tracing of COVID-19 infections. We also review more than 30 other seroprevalence studies whose design was not well-suited for estimating age-specific IFRs. Our findings indicate that COVID-19 is not just dangerous for the elderly and infirm but also for healthy middle-aged adults, for whom the fatality rate is roughly 50 times greater than the risk of dying in an automobile accident. Consequently, the overall IFR for a given location is intrinsically linked to the age-specific pattern of infections. In a scenario where the U.S. infection rate reaches nearly 30 percent, our analysis indicates that protecting vulnerable age groups could prevent over 200,000 deaths.
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w27597 |
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