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Glite Dictionary
case-fatality proportion

case-fatality proportion

8.4
The part of people who have a disease and die from it, often shown as a percent
  • noun
  • /ˈkeɪs ˈfeɪtəˌlɪti prəˈpɔrʃən/
  • Specialized
translation icon : proporción de letalidad
  • The case-fatality proportion for the disease was reported to be 2%, indicating that out of every 100 diagnosed cases, 2 resulted in death.

Examples

  • The case-fatality proportion calculated on the basis of known deaths was 11.4%, but the possibility of additional fatalities cannot be excluded.

    Academic text (2014)

  • Researchers found that the case-fatality proportion varied significantly between different age groups, with older patients experiencing higher rates.

  • Health officials stated that the case-fatality proportion of the recent outbreak reached alarming levels, highlighting the disease's severity.

Surface Forms

case-fatality proportion singular
case-fatality proportions plural

Morphology

case-fatality + proportion

The meaning is directly compositional: 'case-fatality' denotes fatalities among cases and 'proportion' denotes a part-to-whole ratio, so a learner who knows 'case', 'fatality', and 'proportion' can infer it refers to the proportion of cases that are fatal. Although technical epidemiological jargon, the structure follows regular English compounding and is cross-linguistically paralleled in many languages, making the term derivable from its parts.

Etymology

The noun case-fatality proportion comes from counting how many of the cases of a disease end in fatality and then turning that number into a proportion of the whole. So, it means the 'percentage' of people with the disease 'who die'.