The TL;DR;
Initial estimates of mortality rate are all over the place due to uncertainty in the data sets.
That said, the best estimate at the moment is around 2-3% and is subject to change as more data comes in.
Initial estimates of mortality rate are all over the place due to uncertainty in the data sets.
That said, the best estimate at the moment is around 2-3% and is subject to change as more data comes in.
--- Mortality rate ---
1918 Spanish Flu: 10-20%
2020 Coronavirus: 2-3% est.
1968 Hong Kong Flu: 0.5%
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The realization that China censors heavily makes both accurate, timely and complete reporting of facts much more difficult. Intermediaries are used to exfil data to Western journalists, but this is haphazard, slow and incomplete. A journalist who has contacts on the ground described the situation, including that a few bodies on the streets and in crashed vehicles (people who were too sick who failed to make it to a hospital) in central Wuhan were not being collected: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/7/laurie_garrett_china_c... We may never know the exact numbers because it's likely face-saving deception will be used for geopolitical and local political concerns.
It says the mortality rate is 7.1%. Does that make the current flu in the US much worse than the Coronavirus?
Seems like the number is chosen so that you can say an epidemic is anything worse than the flu?
Based on National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) mortality surveillance data available on February 6, 2020, 7.1% of the deaths occurring during the week ending January 25, 2020 (week 4) were due to P&I. This percentage is below the epidemic threshold of 7.2% for week 4.
If you like, every year the flu is a low-level "pandemic" of a relative sort. It goes almost unnoticed like antibiotic/antimycotic-resistant pathogens that are rapidly becoming untreatable due to a combination of factors including over-prescription, meat agriculture, human over-population and low-cost travel.
Oddly enough, I used to work at a biomedical informatics department where one of the projects used commercial data from retail stores to predict and identify bioweapon exposure and pandemics from people buying OTC remedies and prescriptions.
I don’t know how to interpret this that’s why I’m asking.
It seems like the media is captivated by what seems like a relatively small number of deaths in China compared to the 12,000+ here at home.
A Chinese supplier of mine actually pointed this out when he told me to “stay safe” and I was like what the hell is he talking about, but then I googled it and now I’m like wtf.
The current nCoV outbreak is more worrying because the percentage of patients needing intensive care is very high, and because it looks very easy to spread.
It was far worse elsewhere; figures vary widely.