Demographic science aids in understanding the spread and fatality rates of COVID-19

Jennifer Beam Dowd; Valentina Rotondi; Liliana Adriano; David M Brazel; Per Block; Xuejie Ding; Yan Liu; Melinda C Mills

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.15.20036293 doi: medRxiv preprint Figure S6 graphs the population composition and expected deaths in the population for the additional countries of the United States, Japan and South Africa. Japan has a relatively old population, South Africa a younger population and the US is more evenly distributed. Based on the age-specific mortality rates extracted from the Italian data, we project how these different countries will experience deaths attributed to COVID-19 by age and sex. The United Kingdom is as of March 13 2020 is standing out as one of the few European countries to take not stringent actions such as closing schools or stopping large public events. 9 In spite of the comparatively younger population of the UK, the bottom right panel illustrates that the UK could face similar numbers of COVID-19 deaths as Italy. Due to age structure differences, the UK will likely have slightly fewer deaths of those 80+ in comparison to Italy, but in the coming weeks still likely to face considerable pressure on its healthcare system. 9 https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-emergencies/coronavirus-school-closures . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.