That’s a number that is statistically backed up by data across multiple countries.
We now have evidence to the contrary. A small amount, around .2% deaths under 40, but even the survivors require significant medical care to make it, and we don’t have enough capacity. Numbers are showing ~80% mild, with the remainder being varying levels of severity from hospitalization to ICU and mechanical ventilation. Those small percentages are still more than enough to cripple our medical infrastructure.
We have to curtail spread to prevent that, and that starts with making people at low risk take strong precautions and protective measures.
Yes, my brother has it on a cruise ship that has been quarantined off of New Zealand. As far as he has explained it, it just feels like any other flu to him.
My workplace is closed and I’m working from home for the foreseeable future. I don’t know any confirmed cases, as testing here in the UK has been patchy at best, and continues to be limited to the more severe cases. However, I do know of a couple who have been symptomatic and have self-isolated.
There have been a handful of deaths locally too, and my GP surgery is closed because of it, so it’s definitely something to be worried about.
There’s very little chance that this happens. The virus doesn’t benefit from becoming more deadly since then it kills off its own host reservoir (deadly pathogens usually go extinct by themselves soon or late unless it can survive without a host), so there’s no natural selection on making a virus more deadly and well, you can’t get a whole lot more contagious than corona already is, so…
It’s also extremely unlikely that a virus is both very deadly and very contagious, there has to be a trade-off somewhere, because they’re limited in their energy source (like any biological system)
It absolutely can. Mutation is a real possibility given how contagious this thing is supposed to be.
This is one of those “be alert, not alarmed” scenarios. It won’t be the “we’re all gonna die” people that cause actual panic, it’ll be the hoarders buying all the tp and tendies.
Our chief medical officer is saying 20,000 dead, of a population of 60m is a good outcome. A quarter of a million dead isn’t even a fantastical worst case scenario.
Many of those who ‘recover’ are actually being left with chronic lung conditions as well.
This is what happens when people play around with percentages and fractions of a percentage point as the ‘numbers’, they forget the actual scales and real numbers involved.
There are currently two known strains as a part of this outbreak, so for sure, mutations are happening, both strains seem equally as bad. Worst thing about that, getting one doesn’t necessarily give you immunity to the other.
Compared to some seriously deadly diseases like Ebola, it really isn’t. Statistics are also a gross underestimation since a lot of infected with mild symptoms remain untested and will also recover without problems.
Now you could say that it’s the same case for the flu, but because it’s a yearly reocurring disease, they have much better estimates through extrapolation and population size estimation. They can’t for Corona since there’s no information on prior years.
Yes, it can happen theoretically, but chances are very slim. It can realistically only happen through random chance since there’s no benefit for the virus to become deadlier. Now we already know that most random mutations are either lethal to the organism itself (which means that they won’t spread) or have no effect at all.
That doesn’t seem to correlate with China where the epidemic is already dying down at the moment (new infections are negligible at this point). That’s a couple of 1000 dead on a potential population of 1.5 billion…
