Experts Warn of Possible Sustained Global Spread of New Coronavirus

it might be less, the same or more. we don't know yet. it has potential to be more deadly than the flu because of the unknowns, including prevention and treatment.

Yes. The normal flu is very widespread and has a mortality rate of around 0.1%. The official figures out of Hubei are down to about 3.6% (closer to 5% yesterday). There are too few deaths outside of Hubei to draw any meaningful conclusion. To make an apples to oranges comparison you'd be looking on the order of tens of millions of deaths annually if we don't get the mortality and/or infection rate down.

The differince I imagine is how it has 'fresh' hosts, and can spread quickly, possibly overwhelming care, or complicating other medical issues. The flu seems throttled by varied, but somewhat common, resistance in humans, where this has little or none. Otherwise, no, it seems to me, a layman, as being about as intense as the flu from a purely individual, symptomatic perspective.

I too, wonder about this.

The article starts with:

> Some infectious disease experts

But only two experts quoted in the article predict a potential pandemic.

The main worry, though is that it's infectious while asymptomatic, which apparently was not the case with SARS:

> Tools like quarantine and isolation—which were key to controlling SARS—are unlikely stop spread of a virus that can transmit during the period from infection to symptoms, experts say.

Also, of those who died, how many were weak/immunocompromised to begin with, and how many were healthy adults?

Might be that the demographies matter. Influenza kills economically unproductive members of society while Corona (not sure, I’m speculating here) Is more severe in the productive groups. Or more simply, the mortality might be higher

Two points against this general "but the flu" argument:

An October 2019 novel Coronavirus simulation by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [1][2], projected 65 million dead and widespread knock-on economic and societal problems during 18 months of pandemic. Not that this is a likely outcome for nCoV-2019 (which is likely less lethal than the imaginary virus), but it's worth understanding SARS-like viruses can be significantly more serious than the flu.

Secondly, the flu is "baked in the cake" in our general medical and societal infrastructure. A novel virus will be additive to flu infections and even at similar rates of infection/death could cause a noticeable impact. As an analogy, 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, but if some catastrophic, widespread automotive software bug/malware caused an additional 1.25 million road deaths in 2020, it would rightfully be a massive story, could potentially overwhelm emergency and medical services, and would be something to be concerned about mitigating as much as possible.

[1] http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.htm... [2] https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174

> because the true severity of the outbreak isn’t yet known, it’s impossible to predict what the impact of that spread would be

This seems to be a key quote.

When you're making a bet, you should know the odds. Influenza is a known thing. I'm not going to think about that facemask knowing that influenza is going around, etc.

> am I missing something here?

There are vaccines and antiviral meds available for flu though.

The problem is that you don't know if the virus is going to mutate to become more lethal/virulent or less as time goes on. Each identified outbreak that passes a certain threshold needs to be treated as a potential pandemic. The risks of letting another Spanish Influenza or Ebola go global are not worth it.

There is also some unsubstantiated talk (CDC has come out and said it's not evidence supported yet) that this virus can spread before the host shows symptoms which is unusual. Your healthy coworker could come into the office and infect everyone, then come down three days later with the symptoms, and a week later the whole office is out sick. Or school.

Flu is an example of a virus that we cannot control and now comes back every year, kills hundreds of thousands and puts huge strain on global healthcare systems. One thing we are desperately trying to prevent is the Coronavirus becoming another seasonal virus on top of the flu.

There are also additional risks like a higher fatality rate in otherwise healthy people and the likelihood of the virus mutating into something that can spread like wildfire.

A positive effect of a higher number of infection is, that it would reduce the fatality rate of the virus.

Thank you for posting that video. He sounds most reasonable and with zero slogans, and even though with restraint he certainly thinks this can spin out of control.

Remember that people travel to and from China. I'm pretty sure it's illegal for a country to prevent its own citizens from returning to their homeland.

You're assuming preventing death is a priority of the China government.

I don't think we know the answer to this yet. Without an answer, it pays to be paranoid.

If I got it right there is not a single case of transmission outside of China reported. Yet.

I believe we're only a couple days out from the total confirmed cases of Coronavirus to match the total confirmed cases of SARS. At that point, SARS will still have far more deaths.

There's a lot of graphs on projections vs actual numbers since this thing started being heavily tracked. I don't know what sources are most authoritative. Each seem to work on different timelines but all show fast growth.

Google's put the document on lockdown so if you want to save a copy of the data yourself this will get you an ODS file (for now):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yZv9w9zRKwrGTaR-YzmA...