Frequently-Asked Questions

The Percent Change In Deadliness calculation uses the historical Deaths Per Case values, as they are reported day-by-day, and calculates the change from the maximum Deaths Per Case percentage experienced to the current Deaths Per Case percentage.

The basic calculation is as follows:

However, many countries showed an anomaly in their earliest data, with Iran being a good example:

Iran started out with a 100% Deaths Per Case, which is a simple indication that testing began with those who died, with a strong suspicion of related Covid-19 illness. But Iran actually put out a correction that removed the cases that gave that reading, giving a more mixed result that was still high, but came down quickly, before stabilizing once enough data came in.

To account for early data having some reporting inconsistencies, and to ensure that each location had a good basis of data to determine a percentage, a Practical Maximum Deaths Per Cases is used, in which the Maximum Deaths Per Case is only read after the location has had 100 deaths reported.

This results in a zero Percent Change in Deadliness for countries that have not yet had 100 deaths, but those locations simply haven't had enough data to provide a meaningful read for this measure.

The Percent Change In Deadliness over time is one of the strongest measures to demonstrate the ongoing evolution of viruses in their interaction with humans, and that the Theory of Evolution better explains the natural world than Creationism.