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What were age-specific COVID-19 infection fatality rates for 0–29 and 30–49-year-olds during 2020–2025?
Executive summary
Published analyses from the pandemic’s pre-vaccine era and subsequent surveillance consistently show very low infection‑fatality ratios (IFRs) for younger age groups and a steep rise with age: meta-analyses put aggregate IFRs for whole populations in 2020 around 0.2–1.1% depending on age structure (the higher values for older populations) and age‑specific work shows IFRs near zero for children and very small (<<0.1%) for many adults under 50 (examples and methods summarized in Levin et al., Brazeau et al., and Our World in Data) [1] [2] [3]. Available sources do not provide a single, global, age‑specific series for the 0–29 and 30–49 bands spanning 2020–2025; instead the literature gives age‑stratified estimates concentrated in 2020–2022, shows IFRs were much lower in children and young adults than in older adults, and documents temporal and geographic variation driven by population age structure, under‑ascertainment, health system capacity, vaccination and variant waves [2] [1] [4].
1. What the published meta‑analyses measured (and their headline numbers)
Systematic reviews and meta‑analyses published in 2020–2022 estimated age‑dependent IFR very clearly: Levin et al. and related syntheses found steep exponential increases in IFR with age and made clear that overall IFRs for entire countries vary from ~0.23% (young age structure) to ~1.15% (older age structure) in the pre‑vaccine era, because age structure strongly determines population IFR [1] [2]. These studies pooled seroprevalence and death data to estimate IFR by age rather than the crude case fatality ratio [2] [1].
2. Where 0–29 and 30–49 sit on that risk gradient
Multiple sources and age‑stratified analyses show that children and young adults had extremely low IFRs in early pandemic data: population surveillance in England estimated an IFR for <20-year-olds of 0.70 per 100,000 infections over March 2020–Dec 2021 (a vanishingly small figure), and other seroprevalence‑based syntheses repeatedly show near‑zero IFRs for children and very small IFRs for younger adults compared with older cohorts [5] [6]. For the 30–49 age band, studies repeatedly found appreciably higher IFRs than in children but still orders of magnitude lower than among the elderly; meta‑analyses and modeling papers emphasize that IFR rises markedly from around age 30 upward, with substantial heterogeneity by country and time [7] [8] [6].
3. Why you won’t find a single “2020–2025” per‑band number
Researchers published age‑specific IFR estimates mostly for the pre‑vaccine and early‑pandemic period and through 2021–2022; later years are affected by vaccination, prior infection and changing variants, which alter IFRs and make simple aggregation misleading [1] [9]. No single provided source in the search set supplies a definitive global time‑series giving IFRs specifically for 0–29 and 30–49 across 2020–2025 — available sources do not mention a consolidated 0–29 and 30–49 IFR table for 2020–2025 [2] [1] [6].
4. Key drivers of variation across time and place
IFR variation is driven by who is infected (age mix), under‑counting of infections or deaths, health‑system capacity, comorbidities, vaccination rollout and variant severity. Studies warn that differences in surveillance and death attribution bias IFR estimates, and that age structure alone explains much cross‑country IFR differences [4] [1] [10]. For example, Brazeau et al. and others quantify how low‑income countries’ younger age distributions yield lower population IFRs even if age‑specific fatality patterns are similar [1].
5. What surveillance and country reports add (examples)
National surveillance (CDC provisional counts) and country reports provide granular death counts by age that underlie IFR calculations but require matching to infection estimates (seroprevalence or modeled infections) to compute IFR; these data streams are available but dispersed across reports and years [11] [12]. Country‑level studies (e.g., Austria retrospective analyses, Australian death reports) illustrate how IFR and mortality patterns shifted with waves, vaccination, and changing variant patterns through 2021–2024, but these are not synthesized into a single global pair of numbers for the two bands requested [13] [14].
6. How to get the precise numbers you asked for
To produce an exact, reproducible IFR for 0–29 and 30–49 across 2020–2025 you need: (a) consistent infection counts by age (seroprevalence or modeled infections) for each period and location, (b) matched age‑specific COVID deaths for the same periods, and (c) a defined aggregation method (global average vs. population‑weighted). The literature provides age‑stratified IFR estimates and the data sources to construct such a series, but no single provided source already aggregates a global 2020–2025 time series for those exact bands [2] [6] [1].
7. Bottom line for readers
Available synthesized evidence from 2020–2022 shows IFRs for 0–29 were effectively near zero at a population level and IFRs for 30–49 were low (substantially below 0.1% in many settings), while IFRs rose steeply after age 50 and especially after 70–80 [5] [6] [7]. For exact numeric series covering 2020–2025 for the 0–29 and 30–49 bands you’ll need a bespoke analysis that combines age‑specific seroprevalence/modeled infection data with death registries for each year and region because the published meta‑analyses and surveillance reports are fragmented across time, methods and locations [1] [11] [4].