Data

Latest on worldwide spread of the coronavirus As voters in the United States stream to the polls after a rancorous presidential campaign, Europe faces fresh curbs to contain a second wave of the coronavirus outbreak. Reuters Staff U.S.

Reuters) - As voters in the United States stream to the polls after a rancorous presidential campaign, Europe faces fresh curbs to contain a second wave of the coronavirus outbreak.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0

Estimating the size and infection severity of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic is made challenging by inconsistencies in available data. The number of COVID-19 deaths is often used as a key indicator for the epidemic size, but observed deaths represent only a minority of all infections^1,2.

Additionally, the heterogeneous burden in nursing homes and variable reporting of deaths in elderly individuals can hamper direct comparisons across countries of the underlying level of transmission and mortality rates³. Here we use age-specific COVID-19 death data from 45 countries and the results of 22 seroprevalence studies to investigate the consistency of infection and fatality patterns across multiple countries.

We find that the age distribution of deaths in younger age groups (<65 years) is very consistent across different settings and demonstrate how this data can provide robust estimates of the share of the population that has been infected.