OPINION | This article contains commentary that reflects the author's opinion.
According the New York Post, a new study that was able to include undiagnosed cases of the coronavirus was published with the suggestion that the virus may have been less deadly than previously thought.
There is more information available about people that experienced mild symptoms and did not require hospitalization, but are now believed to have contracted the coronavirus.
The data that had been collected previous to this research focused on the hospitals, where there is an abnormally high death rate.
The findings were published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a medical journal that distributes on a global scale, the research, reviews opinions, and news covering international issues relevant to infectious diseases specialists.
New York Post continued with coverage of the new findings.
The study published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases estimated that the death rate will be 0.66%, which is much lower than figures between 2% and 3.4% that have come out of Wuhan, China, according to CNN.
Researchers said the lower coronavirus mortality rate was determined by accounting for cases that went undiagnosed — possibly because they were mild or had no symptoms.
To do this, researchers used modeling based on the number of detected cases among repatriated citizens who were aggressively tested for the virus.
But in line with other studies, the researchers found that the majority of fatalities are among adults who were age 80 or older.
“There might be outlying cases that get a lot of media attention, but our analysis very clearly shows that at aged 50 and over, hospitalization is much more likely than in those under 50, and a greater proportion of cases are likely to be fatal,” Azra Ghani, a professor at Imperial College London and an author of the study, said in a statement.
Researchers noted the death rate for coronavirus is still “substantially higher” than the flu, which leads to death in 0.1% of cases.
There have been protests from some at the notion that the death rate of the coronavirus is comparatively less than the year damage done by the flu. Shigui Ruan, a professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Miami emphasized this in a commentary “very clear that any suggestion of COVID-19 being just like influenza is false.”.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have most recently reported 186,101 total U.S. cases and 3,603 deaths.
