How much does age contribute to the wide variation in COVID-19 case fatality rates across nine countries?

Headshots of Nikkil and Till

Recent Bell Fellow Nikkil Sudharsanan, PhD, and Harvard Pop Center faculty member Till Bärnighausen, MD, PhD, ScD and their colleagues have published a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that finds…

“Selective testing and identifying of older cases considerably warps estimates of the lethality of COVID-19 within populations and comparisons across countries.”

The findings suggest that in order to accurately compare how countries are able to care for patients with COVID-19 and better monitor the epidemic, it will be important to account for these age distortions when calculating the COVID-19 case fatality rate.