The problem is that it's very infectious, R0 could be 6+ where the flu is about 1-2. That means it's 3-6 times more contagious than the flu, so it spreads very very quickly.
At the same time, it causes severe symptoms in 15-20% of cases. When these people have access to medical care, they will likely survive. But if they don't get access to timely health care, they might die, which is what happened in China.
The problem with both the above is that you will get many, many people infected all at the same time, and you might get a few hundred people with severe symptoms in a small city. That's enough to overrun several hospitals all at the same time. The US has about 2.5 hospital beds for 10,000 citizens, which is 31st in the world. Japan and Korea have over 12 per 10,000 citizens. the top 2 in the world. And the patients that get severe need ventilators which are even less than this.
Once the hospital beds are filled, people start dying, which causes panic. Then economies will start to suffer because no one will eat at restaurants, people will panic at Costco like we've seen, businesses will go out of business.
People forget that this is simple math. Coronavirus will spread very quickly in the US and across the world. And many people will die and all hospitals will get overrun. What we need is at-home treatment and to somehow get people to avoid getting severe symptoms. If warm summer weather decreases the R0, then we might be able to avoid it, but some parts of the Northern Hemisphere are still in winter and won't be warm for at least 2 months.
Hospitals will only help if you feel like you can't breathe (and we do not have anywhere near the amount of ventilators that we'll need for this), so the vast majority of people should self-quarantine, take pain killers for fever and wait for it to pass.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/who-says-coronavirus-death-r...
Data modeling suggests it’s closer to 0.98%. It’s also important to note that age plays a significant factor. The IFR is about 0.2% for young healthy people, while it is quite dangerous for people over 60 with existing conditions.
https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an...
> evidence to date points toward 2019-nCoV having the potential to have comparable severity to the 1918 flu pandemic in the absence of effective control and treatment, when averaged across all ages.
Early detection and isolation is key. Much of the world seems to be doing a poor job of it, and that is what is causing people to be concerned.
We need this voice of reason. Otherwise we're just panicking.
So yes maybe it is orders of magnitude more deadly than the flu but it doesn't seem clear at all that we have sufficient information to say that it is 3.4%
Symptom-wise, as far as I can tell, COVID-19 can be similar to the flu. Especially for most people, who may not have much in the way of symptoms. So your doctor isn't wrong per se. But yes, the deadliness of the virus is much higher, unfortunately. So it is not quite similar in intensity, and it is a serious thing.
The keyword here is reported. We don't know how many unreported cases there are, it could be 10x the reported ones. In the US it's much more than that, given that almost nobody has been tested. We have 9 deaths so far and probably thousands of infected people.
Also, the death rate is 1.6% outside of China
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_outbreak#D...
BTW most of the deaths caused by the flu are not direct deaths.
It kills about 10 thousands of people a year in Italy (58 millions residents) while covid-19 has killed only 59 people and recovery rate is very high
Meanwhile pneumonia alone in Italy kills 13 thousands people/year
The real difference?
With the regular flu people stay home and die there, with this one they are being taken to the hospitals, even if there are no symptoms, and the healthcare system is under a lot of pressure for that
Draconian measure are just for that: avoiding a total crash of the healthcare system
Incidentally, the upper end of this range makes COVID19 comparable to the 1918 Spanish Flu (IFR ~2%) according to experts (for example see https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an...). And keep in mind the IFR, unlike the CFR (Case Fatility Ratio), is the metric that takes into account undetected mild or asymptomatic cases.
The "real flu" is relatively non-deadly for most people (even though it still kills a lot of people in absolute numbers) precisely because the healthcare system is capable of providing care to those requiring it because of the flu. It can do this because the flu is a relatively well-understood phenomenon, it comes every year, and although the exact mutations of the virus differ between the years, the overall characteristics of the outbreak are relatively well-known in advance. There are also vaccines against the flu (these are a big thing in allowing the personnel in the healthcare sector to do their work, which of course exposes them to flu patients) and there is medication available that's able to quicken the recovery. Nevertheless, the flu still puts a lot of strain on the system, and having a "second flu" of entirely unknown characteristics going around, possibly even infecting the same patients, for which there is no vaccination and no medication at all is not exactly a thing to take light-hearted.
I would not be surprised at all if the "real flu" would later be found to be much more deadly this year than in the years before, not because the virus was any different than before, but because the additional strain due to COVID-19 negatively impacted care for flu patients.
[1] for the sake of argument, even if coronavirus is not actually similar to any flu strand. I'm not a specialist and I cannot tell the actual differences.
People do worry about the flu, too. This past flu season in Australia was particularly rough, and it was all over the media. It came up in day-to-day conversation.
Part of the reaction is political, too, ostensibly to appear to be actively doing something, e.g., Los Angeles declaring an emergency for 9 infections.
That fatality rate average masks that it is far deadlier for the elderly and high risk patients, with as much as 10-20% fatality rate for that demographic.
I understand the real problem with any flu-like disease is precisely with the elderly and high risk patients. Usually, of course there are always cases of healthy people who die from a flu.
These are worldwide statistics. Breakdown is by age, but I don't recall if there's other categories.
The reported infections number is not accurate. Its a major underestimate of the actual number of infected
2. This isn't flu. The same amount of people will die from flu this year as last year. COVID-19 deaths are additional deaths on top of that. Saying that we shouldn't worry about it because every year many of people die of flu, is like saying that we shouldn't make a big deal of the 2004 Indian tsunami because many people die of drowning anyway.
I'm just questioning the panic-mongering. We should be scientific about this, not panic like those guys in the media.
Covid19 is more contagious and more deadly than "regular flu"
In any case, surely there are some differences between the 1918 world of the Spanish flu and the current world, both in actual medicine and what we learned about how to manage contagious diseases? Maybe the Spanish flu today (I mean, if it started today and hadn't happened before) wouldn't have as many victims.
1: https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471...
I'm asking for data, projections, etc. Do we know it's more serious? If so, the data is welcome. As usual, judging by the media, coronavirus is the apocalypsis and journalists are playing this up for all it's worth.
Some people already told me the measured death rate is already higher than regular flu. That's data I can understand. I'd like to know how this compares with initial death rate of any new type of flu, before it stabilizes itself.
Comparisons to H1N1 and SARS included.
I know COVID19 is different from a regular flu, but is it more serious? "Regular" flu is very contagious and kills lots of people every year. It's ok to study coronavirus and to try to find ways to effectively manage it, combat it or prevent the disease -- but why are we panicking? Nobody panics about the flu and it's proven to be fatal for a lot of people every year. Why the panic with coronavirus, why are people in this very thread worrying about "the death toll"? Is there any projection that the death toll is going to be higher than usual for a flu?
For what it's worth, my doctor told me "it's like a flu, don't worry". A doctor friend of mine told me the same.