How We Got Covid’s Risk Right But the Response Wrong
Early expert projections of how deadly the disease would be were spot-on, but don’t seem to have led to a good balance between prevention and costs.
Did we get it right or wrong?
Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Early in March 2020, I decided to write about the risks posed by Covid-19. I have no background in epidemiology or even health journalism, but I can multiply, divide and make charts and was frustrated with the lack of quantification in most reporting and public-health messaging on what was soon to be declared a pandemic.
In the resulting column I took what seemed to be the most authoritative estimate of Covid’s per-infection fatality rate, 1%, and noted that this was about 10 times the 0.1% fatality rate of seasonal influenza, then conservatively multiplied a CDC estimate of 61,099 influenza-associated deaths in the US in the pretty bad flu season of 2017-2018 by five and 10 to get a range of “300,000 to 600,000 deaths.”