Confronting COVID-19 Myths: Morbidity and Mortality

Pavel Jelnov

No 516, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: COVID-19 mystery feeds the belief that the reported morbidity rates are not related to the true ones and that large parts of the population are already infected, the virus is not very dangerous, and the lockdown is unnecessary. Yet one observes two very strong correlations that disprove this belief. The cross-country correlation between log of tests and log of reported cases (per capita) is 0.87 and the correlation between log of reported cases and log of reported deaths (per capita) is 0.89. Using these correlations, I suggest that the infection rate in no country is higher than 10%. Furthermore, I suggest that the mortality from COVID-19 is at least 0.4%.

Keywords: COVID-19 morbidity; COVID-19 mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215780/1/GLO-DP-0516.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:516

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().