The World Health Organization have released a report arguing that 2-3% of the world's population likely shows antibodies for COVID. I suspect that the number is higher in the developed world but lets for argument sake go with a value of 2.5%. At present the world population is estimated to be 7.6 billion so that by the WHO estimate a total of 190 million people at present have been infected.
Coronavirus worldometer (as of April 21st) places the number of COVID dead at 176K. this of course is an underestimate. In fact it could be off by 30% in most western countries and by a factor of five or so in many developing countries.. So lets multiply this number by 5 to obtain a figure of 0.88 million.
Now disease lethality = number who have died/number infected expressed as a %. This gives a value of (0.88/190)*100% = 0.46%.
An earlier Dutch study estimates that the lethality rate is 0.67%. However the Dutch have a population with an average age of 41 compared to the world average of 29. The disease is known to fall more severely on older populations. The US average is 38.
Suffice it to say the lethality of this disease is looking more and more each day as though it is around 0.5%. This is still significant although far less than earlier lethality values of 3-4%
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