What the data tells us about Covid-19 deaths in Sri Lanka

The first case of the Covid-19 virus was confirmed in Sri Lanka on 27 January 2020. A 44-year-old Chinese woman from Hubei Province in China was admitted to the National Institute of Infection Diseases. Two months later, Sri Lanka has recorded its first death due to COVID-19. In the late March of 2020, a 65-year-old has died of Covid while being treated at the IDH hospital. he had high blood sugar and high blood pressure as pre-existing conditions. Since then at the time of writing, we have lost 229 lives to this deadly disease.

Now Sri Lanka is reporting 47,840 cases of the virus, which makes Sri Lanka’s Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) = Deaths / Cases = 229/ 47,840 = 0.5% (0.5% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have a fatal outcome, while 99.5% recover).

COVID-19 is primarily a 1st world disease. Most seriously affected countries are in Europe and North America, In most countries in Europe, the Infection Fatality rate exceeds 3%. In the USA it’s a little over 1%.

In our analysis, we went through every COVID-19 death reported in Sri Lanka and try to collect the official description of the death. Details of most deaths were taken from the Sri Lanka Government's official press releases. We relied upon news reports on the day of the death for the government press releases' missing cases.

This is the first article of a series of articles we plan to write based on the collected data, and this article is about the age distribution of Covid-19 deaths in Sri Lanka.

First, let's look at the normal distribution of age in Covid-19 deaths in Sri Lanka.