Ontario's case mortality rates by age....

Determining a broad based mortality rate for Covid-19 has always seemed a pretty pointless exercise to me, given that this disease is exponentially more serious for those who are older.

Going off the numbers reported by CTV today (Thursday June 11, 2020) Ontario has identified 31,544 positive cases and 2,487 deaths.  Those numbers show that there is almost an 8% fatality rate for people who test positive for the novel coronavirus in the province of Ontario. 

But of course there's a huge difference between a case mortality rate and an infection mortality rate. Because not everyone who becomes infected with the novel coronavirus gets tested the actual infection mortality rate is going to be much lower than the case mortality rate.

Based on randomized testing in places like California, New York, Indiana and Great Britain the actual number of infections in Ontario is likely at lest ten times greater than what has been identified through testing.  That would mean more than 300,000 cases of Covid-19 in the province, and a mortality rate of less than 1%. 

But "likely" doesn't mean certainly.  The actual number of infections is unknown, without randomized testing  all one can do is guess, and guessing is not scientific.  That's why the computer models have been so horribly wrong. 

So dealing with what we know here are the numbers.

For Ontarians aged 0-19 years of age there have been 1,314 identified cases and zero deaths.  That makes the math simple, for this group the case mortality rate is currently 0%.  

The 20 to 39 age group has 8,708 confirmed cases with 11 deaths, puting the case mortality rate at 0.12%

For those aged 40 to 59 (my own bracket) there have been 9,675 identfied cases and 94 deaths for 0.9%

60 to 79 years has 6,171 confirmed cases with 657 deaths equalling 10.6%

And finally 80+ has 5,662 confirmed cases with 1,725 deaths for over 30% mortality.

All this simply serves to confirm what everyone already knows, that Covid-19 is increasingly deadly the older a person is.  It would be edifying to have access to further data including the number of people dying with compromised health conditions like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and kidney diseases, hypertension and all the rest. 

And it would helpful to have a better idea what the actual infection rate is, not just those who've been identified by a confirmed positive test.  Is the actual number of infections double, five times greater, ten times greater or more?  Regardless we can see that for those under the age of 60 there's less than a 1% of dying from Covid-19.