Three In One Million Young People…

We examine the article “Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population” from the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research, released on 1 January 2023. The study aimed to accurately estimate the fatality rate of COVID-19 among non-elderly populations in the absence of vaccination or prior infection.

LINK TO THE STUDY
Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.114655

The researchers point out that non-elderly people represent the vast majority of the global population, with 94% of the global population being younger than 70 years old, 91% being younger than 65 years old, and 86% being younger than 60 years old. Noting that Infection Fatality Rate is defined as “the proportion of deceased among those infected”.

The researchers sourced information from 38 countries with regards to pre-vaccination data. While they were able to source age-stratified death data from 29 countries. I’ll just jump straight to their findings, although feel free to download the article if you wish to examine it further.

For 0–19 year-olds, the median Infection Fatality Rate, the IFR, was 0.0003%. That means for every one million children who officially caught COVID, three of them on average died from COVID, according to the officially released statistics. For comparison, according to the Australian Journal of General Practice from 2020, influenza had a case fatality rate of 0.0031–0.03% in the paediatric population, with that rising to 0.14–0.45% for influenza pneumonia. COVID has proven to be significantly milder in young people. Although, it should be noted that this flu data is for under-5s, which are typically more affected by flu than older children.

Anyway, for 20–29 year-olds, the median IFR was 0.002%, or 2 in 100,000. For 30–39 year-olds, 0.011%, or about 1 in 10,000. For 40–49 year-olds, 0.035%, or 3.5 in 10,000. For 50–59 year-olds, 0.123%, or about 1 in 1,000. And for 60–69 year-olds, 0.506%, or about 5 in every 1,000 people succumbed to their illness. Noting that this means that for people in their 60s who caught COVID, 99.494% survived. The researchers are just trying to point out that for the large majority of the world’s population, COVID had quite low fatality rates.

The study also points out that at the global level, pre-vaccination IFR may have been as low as 0.03% and 0.07% for 0–59 and 0–69 year old people, respectively, noting that the original strain of the virus was potentially more lethal than it is today, but despite this, people under 70 still had a relatively low fatality rate as shown by the data.

I suppose the key takeaway from this study is that the current analysis suggests a much lower pre-vaccination fatality rate in non-elderly populations than previously suggested. You don’t have to go back very far to find articles that criticised such suggestions. Here’s an article from Forbes from 21 April 2020, “Scientists Widely Criticize Studies That Claim Coronavirus Death Rate Could Be Far Lower Than Believed”.

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