Covid-19 rapidly becoming America’s leading cause of death

Is COVID-19 more deadly than the flu? It's a lot more deadly, concludes a new study by the University of Washington published May 7 in the journal Health Affairs. The study's results also project a grim future if the U.S. doesn't put up a strong fight against the spread of the virus.

The national rate of death among people infected with the novel coronavirus -- SARS-CoV-2 -- that causes COVID-19 and who show symptoms is 1.3%, the study found. The comparable rate of death for the seasonal flu is 0.1%. "COVID-19 infection is deadlier than flu -- we can put that debate to rest," said study author Anirban Basu, professor of health economics and Stergachis Family Endowed Director of the CHOICE Institute at the UW School of Pharmacy.

The School of Pharmacy and Basu have developed a website that explores the infection and fatality rates by U.S. counties for people with symptoms. For this study, 116 counties in 33 states had COVID-19 data that fit Basu's robust criteria for inclusion in the analysis. The site's projections will be updated as new data becomes available, Basu said.

Basu stresses that this website is not a forecasting tool -- it does not predict what will happen in the future. Rather, it uses the estimated death rate among symptomatic COVID-19 cases to project what is happening currently in these communities, such as what are the likely numbers for total infections and symptomatic cases. The tool will also detail how the daily incidence of infections changes.

Now that there is global data about where COVID is spreading, scientists can see the various factors that help mitigate its spread. The simplest and most effective: masks. When COVID-19 started to spread from China to other countries in late January, it seemed like Thailand—a popular destination for Chinese tourists, including thousands who had traveled from Wuhan that month—might be hit hard. But as of early June, the country has had only a little more than 3,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. In the U.S., the death rate per capita is more than 450 times greater.

Several factors likely slowed the spread of the virus in Thailand, including partial lockdowns, contact tracing, and community health volunteers who helped track the disease throughout the country. But one seemingly key factor was the use of masks, which became prevalent there even as the World Health Organization was saying that they weren’t needed (the WHO has since reversed course). Even now, with only a handful of new cases being reported, 95% of Thailand’s residents report wearing masks when they’re in public. A new study that looked at global data found that countries that required masks early in the outbreak, or where people quickly adopted them, as in Thailand, have had death rates 100 times lower than projected.

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It’s something that couldn’t have easily been studied in the past, since the comparison had to look at entire countries and wait for the pandemic to progress. “If you really want to know all of the benefit, you have to look at a whole population,” Leffler says. “If I wear a mask, it protects you. If you wear a mask, it protects me. So in the countries wear 95% or more of the people wear a mask, the other 5% still got benefits, because they were in a country where the virus just couldn’t spread.”