General consensus so far seems to be about twice as fatal as the annual flu. (Which says nothing about transmissibility rate / R0, which they are still figuring out.) Really rough numbers, annual flu is around 0.1% , while the spanish flu was more like 2.5%

So, not a pandemic in terms of fatality. General sense so far seems to be it's more of a big deal than the (run-of-the-mill) flu, less of a big deal than SARS. (Keep in mind that the run-of-the-mill flu is kind of a big deal.)

Care to quote a source for "twice as fatal as the flu"? Everything indicates it's way worse.

6 of the first 41 identified patients have died. That's a mortality rate of 15%. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Caveat: 41 is a very small sample, and the first patients are likely to have been the most severe cases (pre-existing conditions, weak immune systems, etc).

And when you take publicly reported statistics, 42 deaths out of 1441 confirmed cases, that's a mortality rate of 2.9%. But the confirmed cases are probably under-reported (but so are deaths)...

15% or 2.9% are 150-30 times worse than the flu mortality rate.

Because the 1441 confirmed cases are likely to be far lower than the number of people who actually have it. Carriers, latency, people recovering on their own. This ratio is the number that will get much more accurate over the next couple of weeks.

There are far more confirmed cases now, by the way. That number has almost doubled in the last two days.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Need better data to get better mortality rate. Stop hyperbole, let the epidemiologists call it.

Of course, we need better data. But tunesmith was downplaying numbers with unsourced claims, so he needed to be corrected.

The latest stats: 54 deaths out of 1764 cases → 3.1% mortality rate https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/01/the-latest-coronavirus...

All things considered, it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower.

What we need is stats on cured vs died for confirmed cases, but I haven't seen recent figures on that for a while, plus there's an inevitable delay on declaring somebody cured.

«it's highly likely that there are more unreported cases than unreported deaths, which means that the actual mortality rate is lower.»

I don't think so, because deaths lag infections. When the outbreak is rapidly growing, if it takes about 5 days for the virus to kill, then even if you knew all the stats perfectly, you actually need to look at the ratio of "deaths as of day D" over "infections as of D-5" to calculate the mortality rate. If you do this math right now (291 infections as of Jan 20, 56 deaths as of Jan 25) you find the mortality rate is 19%. Assuming infections are underreported by a factor of 5, the mortality rate is still high at 19/5 = 3.8%.

This is highly speculative. What if the under reporting is 10% &c. It's just an exercise in arithmetic, we're going to have to wait for more data.

Mortality rate is compared against recoveries, not confirmed cases. Your figure is wrong.

The spanish flu killed way more than that, at least according to wikipedia. Something like 10-20%. It was a monumental event that killed a percentage of the entire global population. The kind of thing you can only call a true plague. Think like the black plague, where a substantial percentage of some populations where wiped off the face of the earn. Imagine 1/3 or 1/2 of your community dying.

I keep seeing this 2.5% number, and I don't understand what people are talking about.

You're right - it's strange, this article seems to contradict itself within one paragraph. 500 million afflicted, 50 - 100 million deaths, at least it says ">" 2.5% fatality.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/

Dying at a high rate doesn’t matter if they do so quickly. That’s why Ebola has failed to become a global pandemic: it’s too potent and kills hosts before they have a chance to infect enough others.

Ebola is also not airborne it’s spread by bodily fluids. You can’t get it from someone coughing. People flew on planes infected with Ebola and didn’t spread it. It was overhyped by the media. In 1st world nations, it had no means to really spread like cholera.

Ebola was also contained because of tremendous effort of many people, often risking their own lives. Thanks to them you now have the luxury to call it overhyped.

The deaths are mostly among older ages, 60s, 70s, 80s. This group is probably less likely to be traveling.

But does that matter when young infected people are traveling.