My apologies for this being the first post in a couple of weeks. Hoping to get this back to a couple of posts a week now.

I’ve been avoiding discussing COVID-19 much in recent months as it is very much an election issue in the US and that’s not a conversation I really want to be involved in. The progress of COVID-19 is very much a market issue as well though, so I’m going to drop in some hopefully not too controversial statistics on COVID-19 mortality rates as these are now becoming a lot clearer as time has passed.

In terms of deaths per confirmed case there have now been just over 33 million cases and about 1 million deaths worldwide at the time of writing. That puts the death rate per confirmed case at just over 3%, which will be low as there is a lag of about 16 days between a case being confirmed and the likely date of a consequent fatality. However in practical terms the actual mortality rate is likely much lower, as a lot of people get COVID-19 without having been tested, particularly those who show slight or no symptoms at all when infected, which may be as high. The CDC is estimating that the true mortality rate is in the 0.6% area in the USA, which is likely about right. What is very interesting though is the variation in the mortality rate between different groups within that overall average.