I don't see how it would mean fewer SARS-CoV-2 infections. It might mean fewer infections proceed to symptoms, hospitalizations, and death. Just from your source, their CFR is around 0.8%. That's not IFR, so it's hard to really do a serious comparison, but for the heck of it Canada's CFR is ~4.4%, Sweden's is ~5.1%, the US' is ~2.5%, Germany's is 2.2%.
Makes sense. Thank you!
Is it possible to know how certain the CFR measures are? I would have guessed that the CFR depends on the test coverage and maybe other factors as well; With what degree of confidence are the CFR figures treated?
however these are all countries with not too different level of health care, so that my armchair guess would be that this is a meaningful number (would have to be corrected for different age distribution, somehow)
CFR is just confirmed deaths divided by confirmed cases. It's absolutely certain, but that's also why it's not a great basis for a serious analysis of most things. We can comfortably say the numerator is roughly correct, but the denominator is likely too low because we probably missed a lot of cases, given limited testing capacity and just how asymptomatic COVID often is.
IFR is actual deaths divided by actual infections. It's the most important number, but also much harder to figure out, because the delta between confirmed cases and actual infections is, by definition, unknown.
So, in context, if we look at CFRs, it looks like Israelis are 3x less likely to die from COVID than Americans. Maybe that's vitamin D, or maybe instead Israel tested and identified every single person with COVID, whereas America missed two for very case they identified. If we could instead see the IFRs in that case, they'd actually be roughly the same, and it'd turn out (all other things being equal) that vitamin D was irrelevant.
