| What is more important to realize is that the parameters you’re citing haven’t been borne out outside of Hubei, and that everywhere else it has emerged, it’s been...about as bad as the flu. You’re also citing numbers that every credible expert says are systematically inflated. The death rate in China is very likely exaggerated, because (as you say) the hospitals are overwhelmed with panicked locals (which tends to happen when you turn a city the size of New York into a police state!) leading to systematic under-reporting of minor cases. Anthony Faucci of NIAID was quoted in the Washington Post a day or two ago, saying that the death rate will likely drop to/below 1%: ” experts have said the coronavirus fatality rate is likely to decline substantially as they compile a more accurate count of the people who contract the virus and survive. At the Aspen Institute presentation, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he hoped the rate could decline toward 1 percent.” Also from that article: “The fact that there are so many mild cases is a real hallmark of this disease and makes it so different from SARS,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Health Security. “It’s also really challenging. Most of our surveillance is oriented around finding people who require medical intervention.” ” For those who study viruses, the large number of mild cases is reason for optimism. “This looks to be a bad, heightened cold — I think that’s a rational way of thinking about it,” said Matthew Frieman, a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Not to diminish its importance — it’s in the middle between SARS and the common cold.” ” Many experts have said early phases of outbreaks like this one tend to have a large number of severe cases, as the sickest people flock to hospitals and come to doctors’ attention. And in Wuhan, where the health-care system is overwhelmed, people have complained they cannot find a hospital to test them for the virus, let alone to treat their symptoms. So patients with milder versions may be at home, uncounted, waiting out the epidemic.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/most-coronavirus-cases... Again and again, experts keep saying the same thing: the danger of this virus is being exaggerated. But folks like you continue to spread these exaggerated numbers, leading to panic and overreaction: ” Health experts question the timeliness and accuracy of China’s official data, saying the testing system captured only a fraction of the cases in China’s hospitals, particularly those that are poorly run. Neil Ferguson, a professor of epidemiology at Imperial College London, said only the most severe infections were being diagnosed and as few as 10 per cent of cases were being properly detected, in a video released by the university.” https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/bb73bd9c-4d9... |
Wuhan is particularly intertesting in that 50% of males smoke. Additionally, the air is terribly polluted. We know from ordinary flu, both of those factors increase mortality significantly. More interestingly, it looks like smoking may increase ACE2 expression and make people more succeptable to the virus.
So there could be environmental factors endogenous to the region that may not hold globally that drive both infection rates and disease severity.