Question: Back to Saturday’s Q&A, can you break down the August case fatality rate (1.6%) by age?

Answer: Alas, the covidtracking.com data I used to do that simple analysis does not include age data for cases or deaths, so I cannot run that analysis. I’d need to use a different dataset (and am with a couple of colleagues/friends also looking at race; will show you the analysis when it’s ready; in the meantime, I can tell you that our preliminary analyses show that case fatality rates are declining for every age group). We also know that COVID deaths are highly skewed towards older ages and that the risk of death increases with age, as discussed in many previous Q&As. To elaborate on that point, CDC offers several tables here and here you can check out, and I’ve copied one of CDC’s visualizations herein for ease of reference.

Figure 1. COVID-19 Hospitalization and Death by Age (from CDC)