Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Apr 30:7:190.
doi: 10.3389/fmed.2020.00190. eCollection 2020.

Age-Dependent Risks of Incidence and Mortality of COVID-19 in Hubei Province and Other Parts of China

Hongdou Li  1   2   3 , Shuang Wang  4 , Fan Zhong  1   2 , Wuyin Bao  4 , Yipeng Li  4 , Lei Liu  1   2 , Hongyan Wang  3 , Yungang He  1   2
Affiliations

Age-Dependent Risks of Incidence and Mortality of COVID-19 in Hubei Province and Other Parts of China

Hongdou Li et al. Front Med (Lausanne). .

Abstract

The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic of early 2020 poses an enormous challenge to global public health. Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the virus has spread rapidly throughout the world, taking thousands of lives in just over 2 months. It is critical to refine the incidence and mortality risks of COVID-19 for the effective management of the general public and patients during the outbreak. In this report, we investigate the incidence and mortality risks of the infection by analyzing the age composition of 5,319 infected patients, 76 fatal cases, and 1,144,648 individuals of the general public in China. Our results show a relatively low incidence risk for young people but a very high mortality risk for seniors. Notably, mortality risk could be as high as 0.48 for people older than 80 years. Furthermore, our study suggests that a good medical service can effectively reduce the mortality rate of the viral infection to 1% or less.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; coronavirus; incidence risk; mortality risk.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Different age compositions between the general public and 76 fatal cases. Individuals were grouped and presented on the x-axis. For the general public, the proportion of each age group is shown on left-hand side; the number of fatal cases in each group is shown on the right-hand side.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Incidence risk increases in older groups of the general public.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Different mortality risks in different age groups and different parts of China. (A) Mortality risks of all fatal cases dramatically increases in older age groups. (B) Mortality risks are significantly different in Hubei and other areas of China. The risk is present on the y-axis, while the ages of grouped cases are shown on the x-axis.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Zhu N, Zhang D, Wang W, Li X, Yang B, Song J, et al. . A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019. N Engl J Med. (2020) 382:727–33. 10.1056/NEJMoa2001017 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Huang C, Wang Y, Li X, Ren L, Zhao J, Hu Y, et al. . Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China. Lancet. (2020) 395:497–506. 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30183-5 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Donnelly CA, Ghani AC, Leung GM, Hedley AJ, Fraser C, Riley S, et al. . Epidemiological determinants of spread of causal agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Hong Kong. Lancet. (2003) 361:1761–6. 10.1016/S0140-6736(03)13410-1 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Ahmed AE. The predictors of 3-and 30-day mortality in 660 MERS-CoV patients. BMC Infect Dis. (2017) 17:615. 10.1186/s12879-017-2712-2 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Li Q, Guan X, Wu P, Wang X, Zhou L, Tong Y, et al. . Early transmission dynamics in Wuhan, China, of novel coronavirus–infected pneumonia. N Engl J Med. (2020) 382:1199–207. 10.1056/NEJMoa2001316 - DOI - PMC - PubMed