Now here are some interesting stats from a CDC report issued within the last 72 hours. We've talked a lot about the extremely low death rates for COVID-19. The CDC report addresses the rates of hospitalization, the types of hospitalization, and the death rates among hospitalized COVID-19 cases. Per the report's figures, if you're between the ages of 0 and 64 and you catch COVID-19, your chance of ending up in the hospital ranges between 1.178% and 7.31%; and if you are in this age group and are hospitalized, your chance of requiring intensive care ranges from 0.0% to 11.2%--again, keeping in mind that you only have a 1.178% to 7.31% chance of ending up in the hospital in the first place. The total raw numbers, not broken down by age group, are 2,449 hospitalizations out of the 10,442 U.S. cases.
So what are the death rates among hospitalized COVID-19 cases? If you're between the ages of 0-19 and are hospitalized with COVID-19, per the CDC report, your chance of dying is ZERO. Yes, ZERO. In China, the overall death rate among ages 0-19 ranges from 0.01% to 0.02%, which is an incredibly small percentage--0.02% equals 2 out of 10,000, and they haven't even had 10,000 cases in China yet.
What if you are 20-44 and are hospitalized because of COVID-19? Your chance of dying, per the CDC report, is 0.1% to 0.2%, which is well below 1%. A 0.2% chance of dying means you have a 99.98% chance of not dying.
If you are 45-54 and are hospitalized with COVID-19, your chance of dying, per the CDC report, is 0.5% to 0.8%, still under 1%, and which means you have, at worst, a 99.2% chance of not dying.
For ages 55 and up, the death rates for hospitalized cases, predictably, go up but are still nowhere near armageddon territory. Here are the death rates, per the CDC report, for hospitalized COVID-19 cases by age group for 55 and up:
55-64: 1.4% to 2.6%
65-74: 2.7% to 4.9%
75-84: 4.3% to 10.5%
85-99: 10.4% to 27.3%
If you are 75 or older and you catch COVID-19, your chance of ending up in the hospital, per the CDC report's numbers, is 3.392% on average. This is lower than the top end of the average hospitalization rate for ages 64 and below, probably because many people 75 and up with the virus do not go to a hospital for various reasons--lack of transportation, no desire to go, no realization that they have the virus. So let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the hospitalization rate for 75 and older is five times higher than the CDC numbers indicate: that would give us a hospitalization rate of 17% for that age group, which would mean that 83% of this group do not require hospitalization for the virus.
The point of all this is to show that even if you catch the virus and are under 75, not only do you have a very small or extremely small chance of dying from it but you have a very small chance of even needing to go to the hospital because of it, and that if you do need to be hospitalized, your chances of needing intensive care are very low--no more than 12%, even rounding up.
Here is the CDC report:
Severe Outcomes Among Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19