31.01.2022
Paper on the "Infection Fatality Rate" of COVID-19
Title: "Estimating the SARS-CoV-2 infection fatality rate by data combination: The case of Germany's first wave"
In the summer semester 2020, Prof. Dominik Papies organized a lecture series on the economic effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in which economists from Tübingen participated. The course received the teaching award "Wiwi-Impuls 2020" by the student council.
The contribution of the Department of Econometrics, Statistics and Empirical Economics has now resulted in a publication which was published in "The Econometric Journal". Authors of the paper are Jantje Sönksen and Joachim Gramming from Tübingen, Thomas Dimpfl (now at the University of Hohenheim) and Ingo Bechmann (Professor of medicine at the University of Leipzig).
Abstract:
Assessing the infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 in a population is a controversial issue. Due to asymptomatic courses of COVID-19, many infections remain undetected. Reported case fatality rates are therefore poor estimates of the IFR. We propose a strategy to estimate the IFR that combines official data on cases and fatalities with data from seroepidemiological studies in infection hotspots. The application of the method yields an estimate of the IFR of wild-type SARS-CoV-2 in Germany during the first wave of the pandemic of 0.83\% (95% CI: [0.69%; 0.98%]), notably higher than the estimate reported in the prominent study by Streeck et al. (2020) (0.36% [0.17%; 0.77%]) and closer to that obtained from a world-wide meta-analysis (0.68\% [0.53%;0.82%]), where the difference can be explained by Germany's disadvantageous age structure. Provided that suitable data are available, the proposed method can be applied to estimate the IFR of virus variants and other regions.
Thomas Dimpfl, Jantje Sönksen, Ingo Bechmann, Joachim Grammig, Estimating the SARS-CoV-2 infection fatality rate by data combination: The case of germany’s first wave, The Econometrics Journal, 2022;, utac004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ectj/utac004