TY - JOUR

T1 - Estimating the SARS-CoV-2 Infection Fatality Rate by Data Combination

T2 - The Case of Germany's First Wave

AU - Dimpfl, Thomas

AU - Sönksen, Jantje

AU - Bechmann, Ingo

AU - Grammig, Joachim

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Royal Economic Society. Published by Oxford University Press.

PY - 2022/5/1

Y1 - 2022/5/1

N2 - Assessing the infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 in a population is a controversial issue. Due to asymptomatic courses of COVID-19, many infections remain undetected. Reported case fatality rates are therefore poor estimates of the IFR. We propose a strategy to estimate the IFR that combines official data on cases and fatalities with data from seroepidemiological studies in infection hotspots. The application of the method yields an estimate of the IFR of wild-type SARS-CoV-2 in Germany during the first wave of the pandemic of 0.83% (95% CI: [0.69%; 0.98%]), notably higher than the estimate reported in the prominent study by Streeck et al. (2020) (0.36% [0.17%; 0.77%]) and closer to that obtained from a world-wide meta analysis (0.68% [0.53%; 0.82%]), where the difference can be explained by Germany's disadvantageous age structure. Provided that suitable data are available, the proposed method can be applied to estimate the IFR of virus variants and other regions.

AB - Assessing the infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 in a population is a controversial issue. Due to asymptomatic courses of COVID-19, many infections remain undetected. Reported case fatality rates are therefore poor estimates of the IFR. We propose a strategy to estimate the IFR that combines official data on cases and fatalities with data from seroepidemiological studies in infection hotspots. The application of the method yields an estimate of the IFR of wild-type SARS-CoV-2 in Germany during the first wave of the pandemic of 0.83% (95% CI: [0.69%; 0.98%]), notably higher than the estimate reported in the prominent study by Streeck et al. (2020) (0.36% [0.17%; 0.77%]) and closer to that obtained from a world-wide meta analysis (0.68% [0.53%; 0.82%]), where the difference can be explained by Germany's disadvantageous age structure. Provided that suitable data are available, the proposed method can be applied to estimate the IFR of virus variants and other regions.

KW - COVID-19 pandemic

KW - health econometrics; pandemic econometrics

KW - Infection fatality rate

KW - SARS-CoV-2

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143989825&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.21203/rs.3.rs-199388/v1

DO - 10.21203/rs.3.rs-199388/v1

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85143989825

VL - 25

SP - 515

EP - 530

JO - Econometrics Journal

JF - Econometrics Journal

SN - 1368-4221

IS - 2

ER -