An epidemiology term that quantifies the risk that a person who is infected with a pathogen, and showing signs of illness, will die.
Deeper dive
Knowing the symptomatic case fatality rate figure helps scientists determine the danger of a particular pathogen. With a fast moving and novel pathogen, this figure may be a moving target, because only those with illness are tested and geographic differences impact the mortality rate. As time goes on, and more people are tested for the virus, epidemiologists can determine a more accurate figure for the mortality rate of a pathogen. That is why journalists may should caveat mortality rate figures during an outbreak with something to the effect of: “a mortality rate, based on the information that scientists have.”
For COVID-19, many people don’t have symptoms and most epidemiologists are using the observed-case fatality rate, which is the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases, rather than the symptomatic case fatality rate to track COVID-19’s mortality figure. As of early September 2022, the observed fatality rate for COVID-19 was 4.7 percent in Mexico and 1.1 percent in the U.S.