You are citing case fatality rate for MERS and SARS, but not the flu (which is typically 0.1%), and yet in any given year the flu has killed many more people than MERS or SARS. Why? Because millions get the flu whereas MERS and SARS were contained.

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.

This was enlightening and has let me revise my original position. Thanks

The numbers from China are totally innaccurate and underestimating the infection rate by at least an order of magnitude for a multitude of reasons. The WHO has been irresponsibly mirroring the Chinese numbers from the start and frankly cannot be trusted - the director of the WHO was accused by the NYT years ago of covering up 3 cholera outbreaks in his home country of Ethiopia.

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...

Regarding the bonds, that doesn’t seem true. The conditions for payout are:

“ 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...

Iran is at 19, South Korea and Italy 13 and 12.

As of this hour, Iran's now at 26 deaths.

Curiously Iran's smoking rate is low - 1/3 of America's. I had thought that lung-compromised smokers were responsible for high mortality in some countries. Hm.

That could still be true. I imagine there are a huge number of variables that influence mortality rates, to the point where finding correlations is difficult.

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).