Estimating clinical severity of COVID-19 from the transmission dynamics in Wuhan, China

Abstract As of February 13, 2020, there have been 59,863 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections in mainland China, including 1,367 deaths. A key public health priority during the emergence of a novel pathogen is estimating clinical severity. Here we estimated the symptomatic case-fatality risk (sCFR; the probability of dying from the infection after developing symptoms) of COVID-19 in Wuhan using public and published information. We estimated that sCFR was 0.5% (0.1%-1.3%), 0.5% (0.2%-1.1%) and 2.7% (1.5%-4.7%) for those aged 15-44, 45-64 and >64 years. The overall sCFR among those aged ≥15 years was 1.4% (0.8%-2.0%). Authors Joseph T Wu and Kathy Leung contributed equally to this work