Covid’s Infection Fatality Rate Now Same as Seasonal Flu

Daily Skeptic, June 22, 2022: Death rates from Covid are lower than ever, according to an analysis by Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr Jason Oke carried out for the Mail on Sunday. The IFR is now ~0.0333%, similar to seasonal influenza.

Experts say there is little need to fear a recent surge in cases as fewer than one in 3,000 infected people now dies from coronavirus – with the rate even lower for the vaccinated.

The analysis of official data by Oxford University shows the ‘infection fatality rate’ has dropped about 30-fold since the pandemic began due to a combination of vaccine protection and naturally acquired infection.

Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, who carried out the analysis with statistician Jason Oke, said: “There have been an astonishing number of Covid infections so far this year, but deaths have come down.

“Now we are looking at an infection fatality rate for Covid of around one in 3,000 which is comparable with seasonal influenza. 

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By Professor Carl Heneghan*

The Spectator, July 20, 2020: Test, test, test said the WHO. And globally, that’s what everyone did: nearly 300 million tests have been done to detect more than 14 million cases of Sars-CoV-2 so far. The thinking goes: turn up, have your test, and if positive, you must have the disease. But that’s far from the truth. When virus levels in the population are very low, the chances of a test accurately detecting Covid-19 are less than 50 per cent – for reasons that are not very widely understood.

There are two issues about tests to get your head around. The first is the sensitivity of the test: the proportion of people who test positive, out of the population who have the virus. The second measure, specificity, is about the proportion of people who test negative, out of the population who should have tested negative. Finding out the actual values for these two measures is tricky. The Office for National Statistics admits they do not ‘know the true sensitivity and specificity of the test because Covid-19 is a new virus’.

Estimates suggest that roughly 80 per cent of infected people will have a positive test (the sensitivity). Based on the latest data, specificity may be as high as 99.9 per cent for those who test negative. I think this is a bit high, but let’s run with it for now.