The age distribution of mortality from novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) suggests no large difference of susceptibility by age

Abstract

Among Italy, Spain, and Japan, the age distributions of COVID-19 mortality show only small variation even though the number of deaths per country shows large variation. To understand the determinant for this situation, we constructed a mathematical model describing the transmission dynamics and natural history of COVID-19 and analyzed the dataset of mortality in Italy, Spain, and Japan. We estimated the parameter which describes the age-dependency of susceptibility by fitting the model to reported data, including the effect of change in contact patterns during the epidemics of COVID-19, and the fraction of symptomatic infections. Our study revealed that if the mortality rate or the fraction of symptomatic infections among all COVID-19 cases does not depend on age, then unrealistically different age-dependencies of susceptibilities against COVID-19 infections between Italy, Japan, and Spain are required to explain the similar age distribution of mortality but different basic reproduction numbers (R0). Variation of susceptibility by age itself cannot explain the robust age distribution in mortality by COVID-19 infections in those three countries, however it does suggest that the age-dependencies of (i) the mortality rate and (ii) the fraction of symptomatic infections among all COVID-19 cases determine the age distribution of mortality by COVID-19.