off-guardian | The headlines tell this virus is “mutated”, and that China’s “lockdown” is affecting 33 million people.
The Telegraph morbidly warns that it’s “highly likely” coronavirus is already in the UK, whilst CNET tells us the deathtoll is spiking.
It all sounds very scary.
The reality is that 26 people have died.
For comparison’s sake, 80,000 people died of flu in 2018 in the United States alone. (at least, according to the CDC).
Coronavirus – or rather, this particular strain of coronavirus, as
they are very common and mostly harmless – has had 800 reported cases to
go along with those 26 reported deaths. That’s a mortality rate of just
over three per cent.
Further, we don’t even know the details of those 26 unfortunate
patients, it’s entirely possible the 26 deaths are accounted for by the
very old, the very young, or the immuno-compromised. But even if they’re
not…3 per cent mortality is not high.
The death rate of bacterial meningitis, for example, stands at about
10%. Meningitis is an unfortunate fact of life, but it’s not a public
health scare.
SARS, of course, was a public health scare – totally unjustifiably, as it turns out. Most of you will remember the SARS outbreak of 2002/2003 being similarly apocalyptically covered in the media.
In the end, over the course of just about a year 9000 cases resulted
in 800 people losing their lives.
These numbers are rough because, as a
syndrome rather than a disease, SARS is difficultly to clearly diagnose.
Assuming the stats are correct, that’s a mortality rate of about 9%…or
three times this “terrifying” coronavirus.
The simple reality is that this new virus strain is currently
affecting a group of people the size of a small primary school, and has
killed fewer than a bad traffic pile-up or a medium-sized drone strike.
So why the lockdown? Why the fear?
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