- SARS case fatality rate = 15% (WHO - 1)
- MERS case fatality rate = 34.4% (WHO - 2)
- COVID19 case fatality rate = 2.3% (WHO - 3^)
1- https://www.who.int/csr/sars/en/WHOconsensus.pdf
2-https://www.who.int/emergencies/mers-cov/en/ MERS case fatality rate =
3 - https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
^ estimation efforts are ongoing and may change.
Now consider that COVID-19 is much more contagious than the flu and it has a significantly higher case fatality rate than the flu.
Furthermore, people can and do protect themselves against the flu with a vaccine. There is no vaccine for COVID-19. And still further, no one is immune because the disease is new to humans.
So yes, while covid-19 has a 98% survival rate, a widespread outbreak could kill hundreds of thousands of people.
China has been overwhelmed. They ran out of testing kits weeks ago. They have been turning people away from hospitals for months. Major infection areas have been under lockdown, where people are not allowed to leave their homes or drive, even for emergency trips to the hospital. Their official reported diagnosed cases are nowhere the true numbers. They've also punished doctors for reporting new cases. It's all a giant sham.
This pandemic is revealing just how incompetent global organizations and news media are.
Edit: I just read that the WHO also has some incentive to downplay the virus - $425 million in catastrophe bonds were issued that may default if the virus is officially labeled a pandemic...can't seem to find the actual default conditions but there's a clear conflict of interest here. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pandemic-bon...
“ On the face of it, the class B bond should have incurred losses during the 2018 ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the recent coronavirus from Wuhan, China, as both have resulted in deaths north of 250 people, the primary condition for a payout.”
“ But an important secondary condition states that there must be at least 20 deaths in a second country for the bond to release any funds, a requirement that has not been met by the coronavirus or the ebola outbreak.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-world-bank-has-an-insu...
If I understand correctly, even the effect of weather/heat on various strains of viruses is extremely difficult to predict because of how many other factors play a role (air-conditioning, for example).
This is an event which illuminates the folly of relying excessively on media and government. I think it's easy to forget that these organizations are managed and staffed by people just like you and me - worse in many cases, as the average person is not exactly sharing research papers with their grandma, so to speak.
Here's one of the conservative estimates for R0 straight out of China. There's another which estimates 6-8 but I'll leave that to you to look for.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...
And this accomplishes what, exactly? Shortages of gloves and canned goods?
Being “alarmed” is not a positive choice, even if your worst-case projections of the future turn out to be true.
In all seriousness, I'm truly baffled what motivates you to stand out so strongly in your anti-hysteria hysteria. I mean, I'm the anxious type who just like to prepare for stuff just in case, especially if the cost is low, but you appear to go actively out of your way to spend energy on countering any degree of concern, and it's frustratingly difficult to understand the underlying motivation.
If they all go and stock up, what with the JIT-style of many supermarkets, I wouldn't be surprised to encounter shortages.
Even just to avoid the inconvenience of that, stocking up now, while the majority of the population is not too concerned, seems prudent and even beneficial to everyone else
This is NOT TRUE. I urge you to stop relying on the news and look at the literature that is being published in real time. I don't have time for a full response but 15% of cases require ICU care to survive. There are less than 100k ICU beds in the U.S. and the virus spreads 2-5x (R0 estimates from 3 up to 8 depending on source) more readily than SARS or MERS or the 1918 Spanish flu.
Now is the time to be alarmed. The media is behind, for understandable reasons, do not rely on them when in 2020 you have access to the same sources they do. The literature being publishes is almost universally grave. At this point anyone minimizing ncov by comparing it to regular flu is being irresponsible.