Some Selected Mortality Rates by Country for the Coronavirus

The virus has been going on for a while, and a number of countries have been hard hit but are now successful in containing it, some contained it early on and were never hard hit, some have been less successful, and some really have not contained the virus. Let us look at some mortality rates from a few selected countries:

UK (44K/67M): 0.07% or 1 out of every 1,523 people

Spain (28K/47M): 0.06%

Italy (35K/60M): 0.06%

France (30K/67M): 0.04%

USA (129K/330M): 0.04% or 1 out of every 2,558 people

Canada (8.7K/38M): 0.02%

Germany (9K/83M): 0.01%
Japan (1K/136M): 0.0007%

.

These include seven of the ten richest countries in the world.

A few others of note:

Belgium (9.8K/11.5M): 0.08% or 1 out of every 1,173 people
Holland (6.1K/17.5M): 0.03%

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Australia (0.1K/26 M): 0.0004%
New Zealand (0.02K/5M): 0.0004%

.

Sweden (5.4K/10.3M): 0.05% or 1 out of every 1,907 people
Denmark (0.6K/5.8M): 0.01%
Norway (0.25K/5.4M): 0.005%
Finland (0.3K/5.5 M): 0.005%

 

This is all based upon Johns Hopkins CSSE reports. Deaths are rounded to the nearest thousand. Population data is from estimates for either late 2019 or mid-2020 (courtesy of Wikipedia) and rounded to the nearest million. For some countries, there are questions about the accuracy of their statistics, although I don’t think the data from any of these countries are in much doubt. All of these countries are wealthy, developed economies with democratic governance and a free press. I do think there is a difference of interpretation between cause of deaths between say Germany and Belgium, which may be part of the difference between their rates. This will need to be addressed by a study on “excess mortality.”

The mortality rates of most of these countries are not going to increase by much more because they have mostly brought the virus under control. This is not the case for Sweden and the United States.

The graph of the daily cases for the U.S. is:

In contrast, Italy is:

 

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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10 Comments

  1. There are some aspects of the Corona epidemic that are interesting from the point of view of us who often work with WWII statistical data.
    For example, we see delays in Covid-19 cases, which are added at some later date. This evidently happens in peace time. What implications does it have for war time data of similar kind.
    Another example is the categorisation of deaths. For instance, how do you classify a death where the patient suffered from Covid-19 and some other medical issue? If such demarkation problems occur in peace, can it tell us something about similar problems in war?
    Just some speculations.

    • The classification of deaths is a problem, and the U.S. website reports whatever data they get from each country. I have read articles claiming that Germany is overly strict in the classification of who dies by coronavirus while Belgium claims that they are the only one reporting the complete story. Their count is, of course, much higher. Then there are the countries that many people suspect are covering up the number of deaths. Russia is certainly on most people’s list in this regard.

      In the end, people are probably going to have to look at excess deaths to be able to do a proper comparative analysis.

      Germany’s reporting of wounded in World War II was also stricter than the definitions used by the U.S. and UK.

      • “I have read articles claiming that Germany is overly strict in the classification of who dies by coronavirus while Belgium claims that they are the only one reporting the complete story. ”

        In Germany and Austria, somebody who is infected with the corona virus at time of death is counts as victim of the virus.

        In Belgium, people only with covid-19 symptoms at time of death are counted as victims of the virus.

        Belgium produces too high numbers, Austria and Germany is very likely close to the truth, at least we do not in these countries see unexplained excess mortality like in the UK.

        • Well, I do have some doubts about the accuracy of the German death figures relative to other countries reporting. It is reported for Germany (as of 11.34:00 7/06/20) that they have had 197,952 cases and 9,024 deaths, which comes out 4.6% mortality rate. Belgium have had reported 62,016 cases and 9,771 deaths, which comes out to 15.8%.

          Just to compare to two neighboring countries, France has had 204,222 cases and 29,896 deaths for a mortality rate of 14.6% while Holland has had 50,834 cases and 6,146 deaths for a mortality rate of 12.1%.

          And just to round out this discussion, Sweden has had 73,061 cases and 5,433 deaths for a mortality rate of 7.4%.

          Now, I am just crunching numbers, so I don’t know what the truth is…but any numbers that are outside of the norm gets my attention. Germany’s death figures have always been outside of the norm.

          • “Well, I do have some doubts about the accuracy of the German death figures relative to other countries reporting. It is reported for Germany (as of 11.34:00 7/06/20) that they have had 197,952 cases and 9,024 deaths, which comes out 4.6% mortality rate. Belgium have had reported 62,016 cases and 9,771 deaths, which comes out to 15.8%. ”

            You use the CFR, however, this number is dependent on test numbers and test strategy. E.g. high number of early tests leads to low number of deaths. The same number of tests later does not help that much.

            If you check the excess mortality, you find no problems with German or Austrian data.

        • “Not to mention the different mutations of the virus.”

          Look, each virus mutates, that is trivial. However, there is no evidence that the phenotype of the virus has changed, therefore, different death rates are structural not biological.

          Or from a different POV: As long as the virus hits a immunologically naive population, the pressure to change the wild type is low.

  2. I can add a few things about Sweden’s statistics.
    In the past seven days, a total of 112 Covid-19 related deaths have been reported. What’s notable is that most of those are from days before. Only 17 deaths have been recorded on 2-8 July.
    As it is, the daily number of deaths has dropped by more than 80 % since the peak early in April, so it is perhaps not surprising that there is late reporting, but it is still noteworthy. Of course we can expect that there will be further cases added to 2-8 July in subsequent days, but it appears wholly unrealistic to come close to 112.
    I think this is interesting from a WWII perspective. Granted, one of the reasons for the delays is the desire to ensure that the correct cause of death is registered, something which is not relevant for daily WWII casualty reporting. On the other hand, this is not war, with all its confusion and communications problems.

    BTW, I happened to see this article, which is way off what has really been going on:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html?surface=most-popular&fellback=false&req_id=481708583&algo=top_conversion&imp_id=717949650&action=click&module=Most%20Popular&pgtype=Homepage

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