Could you add the timeframe of each pandemic? I believe the coronavirus is 1-2 months old, but how long was SARS to get to 774? I feel like the comparaison isn't great without timeline.

Here are some graphs showing exactly that:

https://ncov.r6.no/

It's also worth noting that the ~8k confirmed cases are bottlenecked by how fast China can perform tests. Here's an article guesstimating that there were up to 100k infections a few days ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-...

> It's also worth noting that the ~8k confirmed cases are bottlenecked by how fast China can perform tests.

Do you have more info on this? I thought the test was a simple swab deal that a country like China could crank through like nobody's business. Like, at least for a few more orders of magnitude.

Replying to myself, this article linked in a sibling comment discusses the issue: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/30/asia/chinese-health-care-...

Yeah, China's healthcare system does not seem to be coping well with this: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/30/asia/chinese-health-care-...

There are already 8243 confirmed cases.

https://thewuhanvirus.com/

The number of cases reported has been going up by 30% to 70% every day. People in China are taking a number of measures to limit spread but given the potentially long contagious incubation period of the virus it might be a while for that to reduce the visible increase even if it has been relatively effective.

It seems that this virus spreading too easy, so it's not possible to contain it, not now anyway. The best we can do is to slow it down and develop treatment as soon as possible to reduce number of lethal cases. But it'll infect the whole world anyway and poor countries with bad medicine system will struggle a lot.

The ui of the map on this page is eerily similar to plague inc.

The news feed too.

Many of those confirmed cases may still die, so that is not an apples to apples comparison.

Currently the number of fully recovered people is lower than the number of deaths.

Just to put it in better perspective:

Coronavirus:

-5,974 confirmed cases

-170 deaths

-143 recoveries

-5,661 still sick

SARS:

-8,098 cases

-774 deaths

-7,324 recoveries

Virulence versus pathogenicity. Perhaps you contend that SARS' pathogenicity is greater than this coronavirus'? But virulence demands our attention, too. Why? Because public engagement can help prevent its spread.

When AIDS/HIV was near its peak, folks would often compare it in a similar fashion to cancer. If we ignore the fact that cancer is a big diverse bucket, most/many cancers really don't have any 'virulence' so getting public attention to drive best practices to mitigate spread just don't make any sense.

No, I think you are misunderstanding the thread or projecting something onto the statistics.

Genomic epidemiology of novel coronavirus (nCoV) via https://nextstrain.org/ncov indicates a beginning last month. SARS-CoV is 13 months or so in length https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/sars/timeline.htm