One estimate for the death toll of the Spanish flu, by Johnson and Mueller (2002), is that the pandemic killed 50 million people. A common example is the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. Unfortunately, writers sometimes confuse case fatality rates and crude death rates. For instance, if there were 10 deaths in a population of 1,000, the crude mortality rate would be, or 1%. It’s calculated by dividing the number of deaths from the disease by the total population. The crude mortality rate – sometimes also called the crude death rate – measures the share among the entire population that have died from a particular disease.
The “crude mortality rate” is another very simple measure which, like the CFR, gives something that might sound like the answer to the question “if someone is infected, how likely are they to die?”.īut, just as with CFR, it is actually very different. That means that it is not the same as – and, in fast-moving situations like COVID-19, probably not even very close to – the true risk for an infected person.Īnother important metric, which should not be confused with the CFR, is the crude mortality rate. So if 10 people have died, and 100 people have been diagnosed with the disease, the CFR is, or 10%.īut it’s important to note that it is the ratio between the number of confirmed deaths from the disease and the number of confirmed cases, not total cases. You take the number of people who have died from the disease, and you divide it by the total number of people diagnosed with the disease. It is relevant and important, but far from the whole story. The CFR is not the same as the risk of death for an infected person – even though, unfortunately, journalists sometimes suggest that it is. This measure is sometimes also called case fatality risk or case fatality ratio. In the media, it is often the “case fatality rate” that is talked about when the risk of death from COVID-19 is discussed.
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