Cross-Country Comparison of Case Fatality Rates of COVID-19/SARS-COV-2

Abstract

Objectives: Case fatality rates (CFR) and recovery rates are important readouts during epidemics and pandemics. In this article, an international analysis was performed on the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Methods: Data were retrieved from accurate databases according to the user's guide of data sources for patient registries, CFR and recovery rates were calculated for each country. A comparison of CFR between countries with total cases >= 1,000 was observed for 12th and 23rd March. Results: Italy's CFR was the highest of all countries studied for both time points (12th March, 6.22% versus 23rd March, 9.26%). The data showed that even though Italy was the only European country reported on 12rd March, Spain and France had the highest CFR of 6.16 and 4.21%, respectively, on 23rd March, which was strikingly higher than the overall CFR of 3.61%. Conclusion: Obtaining detailed and accurate medical history from COVID-19 patients, and analyzing CFR alongside the recovery rate, may enable the identification of the highest risk areas so that efficient medical care may be provided. This may lead to the development of point-of-care tools to help clinicians in stratifying patients based on possible requirements in the level of care, to increase the probabilities of survival from COVID-19 disease. (c) 2020 Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).