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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Episodes / E1: US Response to COVID-19 & Impact on Startups, Venture Capital & Public Markets with David Friedberg
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Friedberg @ 00:18:37Right
healthscience
David predicts that the eventual infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID-19 in the United States will fall in the range of approximately 0.15% to 1.8% of those infected.
if I were to put my money on this. Look, I'm a betting guy. I would be a little bit nervous at this point, but I'd say it's probably somewhere between 0.15 and, um, and call it 1.8%.View on YouTube
Explanation

Multiple retrospective estimates of the United States’ COVID-19 infection fatality rate (IFR) fall comfortably inside David Friedberg’s predicted range of 0.15%–1.8%.

Key evidence:

  • A 2025 analysis using New York City data, adjusted to the U.S. age structure, estimates an overall U.S. COVID-19 IFR of 0.86%. The same paper reviews other work, including Sorensen et al. (2022), which estimated a U.S. IFR of 1.28% (95% CI 0.771–1.877%) before April 2022, based on seroprevalence surveys. Both central estimates, 0.86% and 1.28%, lie within 0.15%–1.8%, and Sorensen’s confidence interval essentially matches Friedberg’s upper bound. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

  • The COVID-19 pandemic statistics page (summarizing CDC and other data) reports that by November 2022, an estimated >313,686,000 Americans (about 94.2% of the population) had been infected at least once according to serosurveys, and that total U.S. COVID-19 deaths were about 1,231,440. Using these numbers, a crude cumulative IFR is ~0.39% (1,231,440 / 313,686,000), again squarely in Friedberg’s range. (en.wikipedia.org)

  • A CDC-linked seroprevalence-based analysis notes that by February 2024 the U.S. had experienced roughly 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths, consistent with the mortality levels used above and with IFR estimates on the order of a few‐tenths of a percent to about 1%. (academic.oup.com)

  • Meta-analyses and national-level modeling (summarized in the Wilson 2025 paper) find typical pre-vaccine IFR estimates around 0.4%–1% in high‑income settings, with a commonly cited early-pandemic global/meta-analytic average near 0.68%—again entirely within 0.15%–1.8%. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

  • Later in the pandemic, the variant-period IFR dropped sharply (e.g., Omicron-era IFR around 0.05% in Italy), but this is for late phases only; the cumulative U.S. IFR over the whole pandemic, dominated by more lethal 2020–2021 waves, remains well above 0.15% and below 1.8%. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Given that best-available U.S. estimates cluster roughly between 0.3% and 1.3% for the population-wide IFR over the pandemic, Friedberg’s forecast interval of 0.15%–1.8% successfully brackets the realized values. Therefore, the prediction is essentially correct as stated.