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, that is, 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 using 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(0.1a), where a is the age in years, is tentatively put forward for the mortality rate as a fraction.

中文翻译：

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两名化学工程师研究 COVID-19 大流行


化学工程涉及可转移到其他广泛领域的技能。一个典型的例子是化学工程师为更好地了解和抗击 COVID-19 流行病所做的工作。在这项研究中，我们考虑了一个 COVID-19 研究界一直未能解决的问题，但用化学工程的思维方式却很容易解决：COVID-19 的真实死亡率或内在死亡率，即 COVID-19 的分数或百分比。 19 名感染者死于该病。我们结合每日死亡数据、可调整参数的流行病学模型的计算机模拟拟合以及免疫血液检测的独立结果，在第一波疫情的两个地点（西班牙和纽约州）解决了这个问题人口的随机样本。相似之处在于基于类似的数据和方法组合来确定催化剂的周转频率的问题。研究得出的结论是，第一波疫情期间，COVID-19 的内在死亡率为 1.45 ± 0.45%，这一数字反映了 OECD 国家的情况。通过结合死亡率年龄依赖性的数据，初步提出死亡率的关系式f _mort = (3.0 ± 0.7) × 10 ^-5 exp(0.1 a )，其中a是年龄，以岁为单位。分数。