Trump's statement that COVID-19 affects only 1% of of its COVID19 patients seriously may sound absurb, judging from US's record number of fatalities compared to the world. I believe he derives his 1% statistic from comparing the number of critically-ill COVID-19 patients to the total number of active COVID19 cases. However, a more meaning and accurate comparison would be to look at the fatality rate in the number of closed cases, rather than active cases, which works out to 9%, not too far off from the 10% fatality rate of SARS which was deadlier. This would be a more accurate estimate to the eventual fatality rate which is computed based on the actual number of deaths over the total number of COVID19 cases. Based on the number of fatalities in the closed cases, France turns out to be the worst-hit nation, with a 28% fatality rate; followed by Mexico(16%), Italy(15%), Spain(13%), Indonesia(10%) and the Philippines(10%). The fatality rates in Brazil, India and Russia are surprisingly low, at 6%, 4% and 2% respectively. However, these are likely to creep up to 10% or more in my opinion, judging from their current state of healthcare systems. Germany is the least hit of all the European countries, with only a 5% fatality rate while the number of recoveries and active cases for the UK are not available to make a meaningful comparison .

It was exactly a month ago when I wrote about whether the US COVID-19 death numbers could hit 100,000 or more. US has now close to 3000 new COVID-19 cases per million population(twice my worst case scenario assumption at the time of writing using Italy & Spain as benchmarks). Note that both Italy and Spain have now crossed 3000 and 4500 COVID-19 cases per million population respectively. The good news for US is the chart of its daily new COVID-19 cases is already forming a top or plateau and the worst is likely to be over, possibly over the next couple of weeks, provided they do not open up their cities too fast. Based on my revised numbers, US COVID-19 death numbers could hit 80,000-90,000, assuming 3500-4000 cases/million population and a 7% fatality rate. A 10% fatality rate will bring this number past 100,000 but still way below the 200,000 initially suggested by the US authorities.

Fingers crossed. Based on the number of daily new and daily death Covid-19 cases, Spain has seen these numbers falling for the past consecutive 3-4 days. For Italy the next few days will be crucial to confirm that the worst is also over for them. US saw consecutive rises in daily cases for the past six days except yesterday, it remains to be seen if this is only a blip. There is hope that the worst may be over for Spain, Italy and even Germany by Easter Sunday.

I think this is too pessimistic and highly unlikely. Using my optimistic case scenario, if US has 800 Covid-19 cases per million population as in Germany, it will a total of 265000 Covid-19 cases(142000 currently). We are already seeing the number of new cases falling and the next few days will confirm this trend. Using an eventual 10% fatality rate(as high as SARs), this will translate to only about 26500 deaths. Under my worst case scenario if US' Covid-19 cases rise to around 1500 cases per million population as in Italy and Spain, which is highly unlikely as many of its states are in lockdown till end April, the number of Covid-19 cases for US will rise to about 500,000 and assuming a 10% fatality rate, we will see only 50,000 deaths and not 100,000 as postulated by some US doctors, unless its fatality rate rises to 20%!

Having said that, its mortality rate(using No. of dead/No. of (dead+recovered) as an estimate of actual fatality rate) has fallen from an earlier 75% to 41% of closed cases, lower than Italy's 44%. Watch out for UK whose number of recoveries is still less than the number of dead, its high mortality rate of 81% is therefore worrying. The only consolation is those critically ill (ie need ventilators) is only a small minority (only 1.5% of the active cases). Next to watch is Indonesia and the Philippines as their mortality rates are the next highest, at 69% and 62% respectively. I worry for these countries as their health care systems are not as robust as the developed countries. Germany is the least affected of the European countries, with mortality rate of only 4%, similar to that of China.