Estimating the Fatality Burden of SARS-CoV2

As the world struggles with the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, public health officials and governments continue to refine the key metrics that are used to capture and compare the state of the pandemic and the effects of responses within and between countries and regions. This work presents a novel fatality metric, the COVID-19 burden, which normalises SARS-CoV2 fatalities with respect to historical mortality rates over the same period of time. We argue that this measure provides an improved basis for comparing fatality rates between countries, and we present an analysis of this measure across 174 countries, using data up to November 15, 2020, to better understand the impact of the virus in different countries and regions.