What do we know about the virus?

It’s quite unlikely that you will die of Covid-19.

It’s quite unlikely that you will die of Covid-19. The case fatality rate as tracked by the World Health Organization officially stands at 3.5%, but that calculation misses out on a lot of unreported cases in the denominator. In South Korea, where testing for the new coronavirus has been most widespread, the fatality rate is about 0.7%. Then again, in Italy, which has also done a lot of testing, it’s 6.2%.

Focusing too much on these estimates, though, can be an exercise in missing the point. For one thing, Covid-19’s fatality rate is much, much higher for those age 65 and older—who happen to make up a second-highest-in-the-world 22.8% of Italy’s population ( Japan is No. 1 at 27.6%), which helps explain some of that country’s problems. Those with preexisting conditions such as heart disease and diabetes also face much higher risks than the rest of us.

Perhaps the more important set of statistics to ponder is that in 1918, an estimated 97.3% of people worldwide and 99.3% of Americans didn’t die of influenza. Yet that year’s pandemic still killed more people than any disease outbreak in history. Maybe, just maybe, the biggest concerns that most of us should have about Covid-19 involve not personal risk but risks to people we care about and to society at large.