Age-specific rate of severe and critical SARS-CoV-2 infections estimated with multi-country seroprevalence studies

BACKGROUND: Knowing the age-specific rates at which individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop severe and critical disease is essential for designing public policy, for infectious disease modeling, and for individual risk evaluation. METHODS: In this study, we present the first estimates of these rates using multi-country serology studies, and public data on hospital admissions and mortality from early to mid-2020. We combine these under a Bayesian framework that accounts for the high heterogeneity between data sources and their respective uncertainties. We also validate our results using an indirect method based on infection fatality rates and hospital mortality data. RESULTS: Our results show that the risk of severe and critical disease increases exponentially with age, but much less steeply than the risk of fatal illness. We also show that our results are consistent across several robustness checks. CONCLUSION: A complete evaluation of the risks of SARS-CoV-2 for health must take non-fatal disease outcomes into account, particularly in young populations where they can be 2 orders of magnitude more frequent than deaths. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12879-022-07262-0.