While coronavirus infections have been surging again across Europe since late summer, the chances of surviving the respiratory disease seem to have improved from the first phase of the outbreak.
The number of Covid-19 patients ill enough to go to hospital has risen less steeply — and mortality more slowly still, according to an FT analysis. Health services are not overwhelmed as they would have been if severe disease had followed infection in the way it did between March and April.
“In western Europe, pretty much every country including the UK is still seeing a much smaller per capita death rate in this second wave than in the first one during the spring,” said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.
The falling “case fatality rate” — deaths as a proportion of confirmed cases — can be explained partly by increased testing, which reveals more infections, and by the fact that a higher percentage of people with Covid-19 today are young and less likely to become severely ill than patients in the spring.
But even patients admitted to critical care are more likely to survive now than their counterparts earlier in the pandemic. Data from ICNARC, the UK Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre, show that the proportion who died within 28 days of admission fell from 39 per cent in the months to August 31, to 27 per cent after September 1.