id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-280672-6x968dwk	Fisman, David N.	Age Is Just a Number: A Critically Important Number for COVID-19 Case Fatality	2020-07-22		.txt	text/plain	1326	73	45	In their article, Sudharsanan and colleagues show the importance of adjusting for the age distribution of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 before doing cross-country comparisons of case-fatality rates. Failure to recognize younger, milder cases diminishes the denominator in case-fatality ratio (CFR) calculations (that is, deaths/cases), so between-country differences in age structure explain some fraction of observed between-country variation in epidemic severity and case-fatality. In their analysis, the authors show that adjusting for differences in population age structure substantially reduces the observed differences between country-specific CFRs. To further explore the effect of age distribution on CFR, we can take the standardization approach used by Sudharsanan and colleagues and turn it on its head. When the reported CFR for February 2020 in mainland China (2.3%) is age-standardized using population pyramids from other countries (7), standardization to a country with a younger population structure, such as Indonesia, markedly reduces observed CFR (1.7%), whereas adjustment to a country with an older population, such as Italy, increases the CFR (3.9%).	./cache/cord-280672-6x968dwk.txt	./txt/cord-280672-6x968dwk.txt