Tyson Victor Weems
1 min readMay 30, 2020

This is a solid review. And the CDC has been putting out some weird stuff lately. I just posed this question to Vin as well.

The CDC just put out this table with numbers for "Symptomatic Case Fatality Ratio."

On the page SCFR is defined as

The number of symptomatic individuals who die of the disease among all individuals experiencing symptoms from the infection. This parameter is not necessarily equivalent to the number of reported deaths per reported cases, because many cases and deaths are never confirmed to be COVID-19, and there is a lag in time between when people are infected and when they die. This parameter reflects the existing standard of care and may be affected by the introduction of new therapeutics.

The overall (all ages) best estimate in the table is 0.004. This seems to indicate that 4 out of 1000 people experiencing C19 symptoms are expected to die. Does this interpretation sound right to you?

Assuming that is what the number indicates, if the U.S. has had 100,000 deaths, that would require 25 million symptomatic infections. That seems unlikely. I've been dorking out on IFR values and have found a likely range of 0.4 to 1.4. These numbers seem MUCH lower. Thoughts? I've been asking around for a week for clarification but have come up empty. Thanks!

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Tyson Victor Weems
Tyson Victor Weems

Written by Tyson Victor Weems

Non-profit founder, musician, coach, X-C skier/CrossFitter, artist, concerned citizen, mammal (not necessarily in that order). See https://weems.works for more.

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