Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters

John P. A. Ioannidis; Cathrine Axfors; Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054361 doi: medRxiv preprint these locations may be even less than twice the cumulative risk to-date, assuming a fairly symmetric epidemic wave, as in the case of Wuhan. In other locations, the total deaths may be more than twice the numbers as of April 4. However, even if the total deaths are several fold higher than the number of deaths documented until the data cut-off, the risk in individuals <65 years old remains very small. Moreover, females may have 2-3 lower risk than males. These numbers correspond to the main epicenters of the pandemic, since our eligibility criteria were set explicitly to include the locations with the highest numbers of deaths. Therefore, for the vast majority of countries around the world and for the vast majority of states and cities in the USA with, the risk of death from COVID-19 this season for people <65 years old may be even smaller than the risk of dying from a car accident during daily commute.