Unpacking the Drop in COVID-19 Case Fatality Rates: A Study of National and Florida Line-Level Data

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the United States's case fatality rate (CFR) has plummeted. Using national and Florida data, we unpack the drop in CFR between April and December 2020, accounting for such confounders as expanded testing, age distribution shift, and detection-to-death lags. Guided by the insight that treatment improvements in this period should correspond to decreases in hospitalization fatality rate (HFR), and using a block-bootstrapping procedure to quantify uncertainty, we find that although treatment improvements do not follow the same trajectory in Florida and nationally (with Florida undergoing a comparatively severe second peak), by December, significant improvements are observed both in Florida and nationally (at least 17% and 55% respectively). These estimates paint a more realistic picture of improvements than the drop in aggregate CFR (70.8%-91.1%). We publish a website where users can apply our analyses to selected demographics, regions, and dates of interest.