Cross-Country Comparison of Case Fatality Rates ofCOVID-19/SARS-COV-2

ABSTRACT

Objectives@#Case fatality rates (CFR) and recovery rates are important readouts during epidemics andpandemics. In this article, an international analysis was performed on the ongoing coronavirus disease2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. @*Methods@#Data were retrieved from accurate databases according to the user’s guide of data sourcesfor patient registries, CFR and recovery rates were calculated for each country. A comparison of CFRbetween countries with total cases ≥ 1,000 was observed for 12th and 23rd March. @*Results@#Italy’s CFR was the highest of all countries studied for both time points (12th March, 6.22% versus23rd March, 9.26%). The data showed that even though Italy was the only European country reported on12rd March, Spain and France had the highest CFR of 6.16 and 4.21%, respectively, on 23rd March, whichwas strikingly higher than the overall CFR of 3.61%. @*Conclusion@#Obtaining detailed and accurate medical history from COVID-19 patients, and analyzingCFR alongside the recovery rate, may enable the identification of the highest risk areas so that efficientmedical care may be provided. This may lead to the development of point-of-care tools to helpclinicians in stratifying patients based on possible requirements in the level of care, to increase theprobabilities of survival from COVID-19 disease.