The second kind is the proportion of people who die after having the infection overall; as many of these will never be picked up, this figure has to be an estimate. This is the “infection fatality rate”. In other words, the case fatality rate describes how many people doctors can be sure are killed by the infection, versus how many people the virus kills overall, says Carl Heneghan, an epidemiologist and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford; he is also a GP in recovery from a suspected Covid-19 infection.
