Anthony Fauci should have known better than to make a mistake like this in March 2020, saying the coronavirus mortality rate was 2%, but I think he's getting beat up over this unfairly.
He meant case mortality rate.
Technically that's not a thing, but that's how most of us were talking at the time, as a synonym for case fatality rate. Admittedly using the word "mortality" in this way only confuses matters. And to this day. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Berenson.
Fauci was, after all, responding to the popular press, understanding correctly how the popular press talks about these matters.
Mortality rate is a technical measure of the number of deaths in a particular population per unit of time, usually annual, usually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 of population (not per cases!). Since the virus was barely 3 months old, any annual rate could only be a projection, not an observation, and I don't think Fauci was so foolish as to be making such a projection based on not even three months experience with a new virus.
The implications of a 2% mortality rate would be astounding. It would mean 2% of the US population dying over the course of a year, or 6.6 million. The quick spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world by aircraft was reason enough to think this magnitude of death was possible if in fact prevalence of the disease were to dwarf that for influenza.
I don't think Fauci meant that. I think he meant case fatality rate, which fluctuates with cases and necessarily declines over time. One person gets sick with something new and dies, the case fatality rate is automatically 100%. The second case survives, the rate falls to 50%, and so on. CFR is a function of cases.
Mortality rate is function of population and time.
His flu comparison shows that he didn't mean the mortality rate technically understood. He didn't technically give the "mortality rate" for the flu.
He gave the case fatality rate for flu, which is 0.1%.
Prevalence of influenza in the US is roughly 8% of population annually on average (the morbidity rate). In any given year roughly 8% of the population gets the flu. 8% of 328 million people is 26 million cases, 0.1% of which die every year, or 26,000. If the prevalence is a little higher, you'll get more deaths. Just one more point of prevalence gets you to almost 30 million cases and 30,000 deaths, and so on. And that's what we've actually experienced in the US. As the population has aged, more older people have experienced flu which kills. Annual cases for all groups have come in at an average of almost 30 million for the last decade. Deaths have averaged almost 36k per year.
That's an average annual case fatality rate of 0.12%, just as Fauci indicated in the email.
So it's pretty clear to me that Fauci was not referring to the technical "mortality rate", but to the "case fatality rate". We were all talking about it, sloppily.
Here's how COVID-19 in the United States actually looks after what amounts to one year, using covidtracking.com data through March 7, 2021, when it quit its data gathering operation, from which we can calculate an actual mortality rate because it had been a year (population figure is US Census for Sep 7, 2020, the mid-way point, at 331.7774 million):
Confirmed US cases C19 to 3/7/21: 28.7565 million
Cumulative hospitalized to 3/7: 0.8786m
Cumulative dead to 3/7: 0.5152m
% cases hospitalized: 3.06
% cases dead: 1.79 (case fatality rate)
% population infected: ~ 8.67 (morbidity rate, very similar to influenza)
% pop. hospitalized: ~ 0.26
% pop. dead: ~ 0.16 (mortality rate).
Now let's compare COVID-19 to flu in terms of the "mortality rate", technically understood, expressed per 100k of population.
To 3/7/21, 515151 C19 deaths per 331.7774 million people works out to 155 deaths per 100k.
Average annual flu deaths of 36,000 per 331.7774 million people (0.011% of population) works out to 10.85 deaths per 100k (In 2019 it was 15.2/100k).
Thus COVID-19 in the US after one year has a mortality rate 14.3 times worse than for the flu on average. Its case fatality rate, 1.79%, has been 14.9 times worse than for flu's average 0.12%.
Fauci's 2% estimate in March 2020 was good enough for government work.
