Two chemical engineers look at the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

Chemical engineering involves a skill set that is transferrable to a broad range of other areas. A case in point is the work that is being done by chemical engineers to better understand and fight the COVID‐19 epidemic. In this study, we consider a problem that has eluded the COVID‐19 research community, which is nevertheless very tractable with a chemical engineering mindset: the true or intrinsic mortality rate of COVID‐19, i.e., the fraction or percentage of COVID‐19 infected people that die of the disease. We solve this problem in two locations (Spain and the state of New York) for the epidemic's first wave with a combination of daily death data, a fit of a computer simulation of an epidemiological model with adjustable parameters, and independent results of immunological blood testing on a random sample of the population. Parallels are drawn with the problem of determining the turnover frequency of a catalyst based on a similar combination of data and approaches. It is concluded from the study that the intrinsic mortality rate of COVID‐19 was 1.45 ± 0.45 % during the first wave, a number that reflects OECD countries. By incorporating data on the age dependence of the mortality rate, a relationship f mort = (3.0 ± 0.7)×10 −5 exp(0.1 a ), where a is the age in years, is tentatively put forward for the mortality rate as a fraction. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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