While the number of COVID cases being reported by countries depends as much on the scale of testing than the level of infections, the number of COVID deaths should be more comparable between countries. After all, whether a country is testing or not, the COVID death would be reported. However, there is a twist, a country has a choice on what to report as the cause of death. Someone who had COVID but also (say) pneumonia could be reported as a COVID death or a pneumonia death.
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- While the number of COVID cases being reported by countries depends as much on the scale of testing than the level of infections, the number of COVID deaths should be more comparable between countries. After all, whether a country is testing or not, the COVID death would be reported. However, there is a twist, a country has a choice on what to report as the cause of death. Someone who had COVID but also (say) pneumonia could be reported as a COVID death or a pneumonia death.
- With this in mind, we look at the fatality rate of COVID across countries by computing the reported COVID deaths per 100,000 population. And, we do end up finding dramatic differences across countries.
- Spain and Italy stand out having suffered the most COVID deaths at around 40 deaths per 100,000. France, UK, Switzerland, Sweden and the US are next. Meanwhile, at the other of the spectrum, Nigeria, Taiwan, India, Pakistan and Hong Kong have suffered only 0.05 or less deaths per 100,000. This means that Spain has suffered almost 7000 times more deaths than Nigeria, or 6000 time more than Taiwan.
- Now perhaps one could argue that Spain and Italy were poorly organised around this, but well-organised Germany has suffered 5 deaths per 100,000. This is much more than most countries we follow in this tracker including countries ranging from South Africa to Thailand to Poland.
- This all suggests that we don’t have a consistent method of reporting COVID deaths across countries. And crucially, many countries are likely under-reporting deaths.
Chart 1: COVID-19 Deaths per 100,000
Source: John Hopkins CSSE, Macro Hive
Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.
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