Dr. Kalyanaram is a highly cited scholar whose research covers Management Science; Education and Public Policy; Economics; and Innovation.  He has been a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the East-European and Russian Research Center.  

Covid 19: Estimates of Mortality in the US

Covid 19: Estimates of Mortality in the US

Kalyanaram Gurumurthy

Coronavirus (Covid 19) has proved to be very infectious, transmitted via contact and air-borne. By various estimates about 30-50 percent of patients are asymptomatic. And they can transmit the infection too.

Covid 19 has been spreading across the globe with speed and ferocity. Here, in the US too, the infection is inflicting a lot of hurt. The question is: What is a reasonable estimate of mortality? Estimates have ranged from 2 million to 100,000 by end of July. One of the widely cited models is the University of Washington Model. The model projects about 93,000 deaths by about August 4, 2020. See: https://covid19.healthdata.org/

While this is plausible, even 93,000 appears to be on higher end. Here is why. The aggregate numbers of infections and mortality for the US (on March 30th) are thus. Total number of infections are 139,773. Total number of deaths is 2,429. So, the percentage of mortality is about 1.7. For 100,000 deaths, assuming mortality rate of 2 percent, the total number of infections must be about 5 million.

Are we going to get 5 million deaths in the months of April-May-June-July? That is about 1.25 million infections a month, about 30,000 infections a week on a continuous basis for the next four months. That's the question.

Based on the evidence thus far, those numbers appear high. So far, we have had about 150,000 infections or so in about two weeks. Of course, a dramatic increase in the pace of infection is plausible but appears to be relatively lower probability event. The data from all of US, and from the State of New York which is most afflicted, appear to already show a leveling off. https://twitter.com/Kalyanaram_G/status/1244810297669554183?s=20

Here are useful sources of data: Covid Tracking; University of Washington; John Hopkins; and New York City Tracker.

We will have to wait and see.

Footnote on April 7th: Please note the University of Washington model updates its estimates and projections periodically. About March 30th or so, the estimate of mortality was about 93,000 (by end of July), and now (April 6th) it is about 82,000.

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