Decoding India's Low Covid-19 Case Fatality rate / Minu Philip, Debraj Ray, S. Subramanian.

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Philip, Minu

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w27696.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: India's case fatality rate (CFR) under covid-19 is strikingly low, trending from 3% or more, to a current level of around 2.2%. The world average rate is far higher, at around 4%. Several observers have noted that this difference is at least partly due to India's younger age distribution. In this paper, we use age-specific fatality rates from 14 comparison countries, coupled with India's distribution of covid-19 cases to "predict" what India's CFR would be with those age-specific rates. In most cases, those predictions are lower than India's actual performance, suggesting that India's CFR is, if anything, too high rather than too low. We supplement the prediction exercises with the application of a decomposition technique, and we additionally account for time lags between case incidence and death, for a more relevant cross-country perspective in the growth phase of the pandemic.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w27696 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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August 2020.

India's case fatality rate (CFR) under covid-19 is strikingly low, trending from 3% or more, to a current level of around 2.2%. The world average rate is far higher, at around 4%. Several observers have noted that this difference is at least partly due to India's younger age distribution. In this paper, we use age-specific fatality rates from 14 comparison countries, coupled with India's distribution of covid-19 cases to "predict" what India's CFR would be with those age-specific rates. In most cases, those predictions are lower than India's actual performance, suggesting that India's CFR is, if anything, too high rather than too low. We supplement the prediction exercises with the application of a decomposition technique, and we additionally account for time lags between case incidence and death, for a more relevant cross-country perspective in the growth phase of the pandemic.