Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY
Volume 36, Issue 1, Pages 1-9Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10654-020-00711-7
Keywords
Epidemiology; Infectious diseases; Mortality; Covid-19
Categories
Funding
- University of Bristol
- UK Medical Research Council [MC_UU_00011/6]
- Spanish State Research Agency
- Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2019-2023 Program [CEX2018-000806-S]
- Generalitat de Catalunya through the CERCA Program
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The death rate of Covid-19 increases exponentially with age, with the main risk factors being underlying conditions, and the relationship between CFR and age is approximately linear in various countries. Compared to SARS, Covid-19 and SARS have different age patterns in terms of death.
The Covid-19 death rate increases exponentially with age, and the main risk factors are having underlying conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, severe chronic respiratory disease and cancer. These characteristics are consistent with the multi-step model of disease. We applied this model to Covid-19 case fatality rates (CFRs) from China, South Korea, Italy, Spain and Japan. In all countries we found that a plot of log(CFR) against log(age) was approximately linear with a slope of about 5. We also conducted similar analyses for selected other respiratory diseases. SARS showed a similar log-log age-pattern to that of Covid-19, albeit with a lower slope, whereas seasonal and pandemic influenza showed quite different age-patterns. Thus, death from Covid-19 and SARS appears to follow a distinct age-pattern, consistent with a multi-step model of disease that in the case of Covid-19 is probably defined by comorbidities and age producing immune-related susceptibility.
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