How deadly is the new coronavirus (COVID-19) ?

If half of cases in those over 80 are being missed, it would halve these figures, says Riou. At the other end of the spectrum, Jason Oke at the University of Oxford thinks not all of the deaths attributed to the coronavirus are caused by it. He points out that while there is an excess of deaths in Italy according to EuroMOMO, a public health monitoring organisation, it isn’t as large as that during the last bad flu season in 2016.