Someone who is more versed in the usual statistics, how serious is it? Without domain knowledge, I have no idea if the few dozen deaths in this period at these locations is significant or not.
Deaths are mostly among immunocompromised, elderly or very young. Chances are you're going to be fine, if you get it, but it'll be a long and painful 2 weeks. The youngest adult that died was 34.
That said with a mortality rate of 2%, affecting a country like China with 1.4 billion people, even if half the people get infected, that's 14 million dead.
That was largely caused by high dose of hormone used during treatment. I can be wrong but hormone is no longer used that often/much in the current outbreak.
Also a question if it will be able to mutate in a larger population, given its long incubation period without symptoms it has more opportunity. I don't know how likely this is. Another question is how long will it continue to expand in reach in China and much affect it will have on the economy.
Summary: We know of deletion event in SARS Orf8, and amino acid change in ebola glycoprotein. In both cases, it decreased viral replication or virulence.
You say "even" as if it's a conservative estimate, but to me 50% of the country's population being infected by the same virus sounds extreme. Wouldn't this be on the extreme side?
If we assume that this virus is as infectious as the common cold, we can expect the infection rate within a household to be approximately 25% of contacts. That means that of the people you LIVE with, 25% will catch it from you.
50% infection rate in a large, distributed population like China would be very extreme.
Over any time frame, it's still quite extreme. To use influenza as a proxy, which has virulence comparable to the cold, the yearly incidence rate in China is <35 per 100,000. Even if this is a full 100x worse, we aren't even getting close to 50% infection rate over the season or a 6 month time frame.
Those colds that you’re seeing represent common symptoms of many viruses (metapneumovirus, paraflu, influenza, rhinovirus, RSV, etc, etc ... and many of these have multiple subtypes which can be concurrently circulating). In other words, you’re noticing common symptoms not necessarily the same virus.
> Those colds that you’re seeing represent common symptoms of many viruses
And not just that. I have a septum deviation, so I basically have a runny nose all winter long, even though, most of the time, no viruses are involved.
Peak cold symptoms last about 3 days. I never said 50% of the population have the same cold at once. 50% catching it over a 6 month period is very reasonable.
> Chances are you're going to be fine, if you get it, but it'll be a long and painful 2 weeks.
They've reported that strong symptoms occur in only 25% of cases, so if you get it chances are you're just experiencing having a cold (which is caused by a coronavirus).
A relevant question is also, if most deaths really are among immunocompromised, elderly or very young, then how many of those 2% would have been killed by the flu or similar if coronavirus hadn't shown up? 14 million dead is terrible by any measure, but I'm wondering how much of a change over the norm it actually represents.
It's 3-4 orders of magnitude more deadly than the normal seasonal flu. The mortality rate is similar to SARS, but with far more infections.
The above comment saying that it "mostly" impacts elderly is a bit vague. The fact that within the first 100 deaths were multiple young healthy people means it is dangerous for the entire population. People in their 30s and 40s are not "old".
There was a single death of someone in their 30s out of 100+. And I don't even know if its been confirmed if they were immunocomprimised or not. Every other person to die was 47 or above, many of who had previous health issues. 1 out of 100 is is a pretty good indication that it mostly dangerous to the older population. The fact that no young children to have died yet, which also tend to be a vulnerable group for viruses like influenza and SARS is also worth noting.
Also, you should be more precise in your wording. 3-4 orders of magnitude worse than the flu is absolutely not true. The mortality rate for the flu is around 14.3 per 100,000. With this as a baseline, 4 orders of magnitude is 143%, which isn't actually possible unless you are aware of people being able to die more than once. Even 3 orders of magnitude is 14.3%, which is higher than SARS. The current estimate is around 2%, which is more like 2 orders of magnitude.
"50% of the deaths were under 47"... fixed that for you.
Also implying people over 47 are elderly and not worthy caring about? Most middle managers, craftsmen, ceo's, politicians, doctors, professors, military officers would disagree.
50% of deaths were under 47? Do you have a source for this? Because I can't find that anywhere, and the last time anyone reported any numbers it was literally all but 1 were 47 or older.
And I'm not implying that people 47 and older arent worth caring about. But that group is always tends to have more severe health problems, which is why people should take those numbers with a grain of salt.
I guess it really depends on what share of the cases got reported.
Early disease death rates are always overestimated because people tend to report only the worst cases of it (even more if the usual symptoms look like a cold). But there is no way to know by how much we are overestimating it.
That said with a mortality rate of 2%, affecting a country like China with 1.4 billion people, even if half the people get infected, that's 14 million dead.
So overall serious on a large scale.