We went through all 204 Covid-19 deaths in Sri Lanka of the year 2020 and here is what we found.
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.
you can download high-quality pdf of the above graph here.
More men are dying from COVID-19 worldwide than women, and the potential reasons run the gamut from biology to bad habits.
A study published in April in Frontiers in Public Health reported that men and women were equally likely to contract the novel coronavirus.
However, the researchers also reported that men are significantly more likely to suffer severe effects of the disease.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that 63% of deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe have been among men.
The same trend can be observed here. According to the data, Among 204 reported deaths, 127 were male, and 77 were female. As a percentage, it’s roughly 62% male and 38% female.
Please note that for 4 deaths reported in Sri Lanka the government did not mention their gender in the press release or they referred to the deceased as he or she in the release. For these four cases, we assume those were males. The same applied to the 16-day infant died of Covid 19 as the 143rd death in Sri Lanka.
The average age of a deceased due to covid-19 in Sri Lanka is 66. Median Age of the distribution is 69. As we mentioned before, according to the varies studies done in the world stage, a man has a higher risk of dying in covid-19 than a woman. And studies show that is the tread among every age group. Which makes the average age of a male death due to covid-19 is lower than a woman’s death.
In Sri Lanka, the gap between these two is almost 4 years. According to our data average among male deaths are 64, and for women, it’s 68.
The following represents those numbers in the face of the age vs death number graph for the covid-19 deaths in Sri Lanka.
you can download high-quality pdf of the above graph here.
The upcoming article will be about the pre-existing conditions and risk factors of Covid-19 in Sri Lanka.
It’s not been an easy job to get this data into one place; we have to go through every press release and read dozens of news articles to compile this data set. If you are a researcher or data scientist who likes to play with this dataset, please contact us through, admin@numbers.lk.
