Every single person on earth will eventually get it. Time is the essence here. There is no vaccine, and a full blown epidemic will completely bog down all health care, and millions of people will die, if not from the disease directly than from general lack of healthcare. Thus, the only thing that can be done at the moment is slow it down as much as possible. Let it spread slowly to give the hospital’s a fighting chance.
Cobalt wrote:
So at this point, if it becomes pandemic, we can expect around 10 times as many dead than in a bad flu year as the BEST case. And if it becomes endemic after that, every year (unless we develop immunity / an effective vaccine / the strain dies out between seasons)
I don’t know where you take that from. Care to share your source ?
LeSving wrote:
Every single person on earth will eventually get it. Time is the essence here. There is no vaccine, and a full blown epidemic will completely bog down all health care, and millions of people will die, if not from the disease directly than from general lack of healthcare. Thus, the only thing that can be done at the moment is slow it down as much as possible. Let it spread slowly to give the hospital’s a fighting chance.
You are probably talking about bird flu, smallpox and plague? the last one “did only” hit 50% of earth population
On no vaccine, Ebola (which is more epidemic and deadly) just come out in Dec19 but of no use now
Spanish flu infected about 30%. Flu gets 20% each year. Estimates I’ve seen for Coronavirus are as high as 60%. So not ‘every single person’, but a substantial proportion.
and millions of people will die
Are you ready to put some bet on this? It sounds like common scenario of B-production outbreak movie 
rather than informed conclusion based on known scientific facts.
The difference is that Spanish Flu did the really big one at a time when people didn’t travel. Today, such a disease spreads very fast.
Still it is amazing why say UK and Germany has so few cases while Italy has loads, and Iran seems to have a really bad situation. There was an interview on the TV yesterday where the “expert” refused to confirm that children tend to not get it, presumably because it would make people not co-operate with containment methods involving the closure of schools and such.
Well, let’s say that only 10% of people get infected rather than 60%, and that only 0.25% of them die rather than 2.5%, that would still mean ‘millions’ of deaths. About 2 million. So there’s nothing alarmist in saying that millions of people might die, because it’s true.
On the other hand at risk of sounding callous and ageist, not all deaths are equal.
Consider a 95 year old in a nursing home who no longer knows her name or recognises her children. She has hemiplegia due to a stroke, and screams whenever people try to wash her or change her wet clothes. Because she can’t sit out of bed she develops pneumonia, so she is rushed to A&E, jabbed with needles, filled her with antibiotics and her life is saved. As an aside, she dies a month later after a long battle with Clostridium Difficile caused by her antibiotic therapy. Relatives successfully sue the hospital because she died of a preventable hospital acquired infection.
Now imagine a kid who gets a measles vaccine and as a result, doesn’t die until she’s 95. Admittedly you may have to vaccinate a lot of kids to achieve that result, but ultimately that’s what it boils down to.
Most sick people lie somewhere between these extremes, but I think most would agree that it’s worse when children or younger adults die, particularly if they have dependents such as kids/partners. As important as the question of how many people the pandemic will kill, is whom it will kill.
So far, mercifully, kids seem to get off pretty much unscathed. A few days ago I read that only one teenager had died so far. Over 80s don’t fare well and their mortality is well into double digits. Thankfully it isn’t like 1918 flu which killed adults of working age in preference to older adults. I think the lion’s share of the deaths are likely to comprise reasonably active older patients, which is a shame. But there will be significant numbers of deaths in younger people in their 20s to 40s as well.
What may be relatively new to us, in the UK at least, is the concept of deciding who lives and who dies. In recent years we have been blessed with the economic capacity to do all things possible for all people at all times, but this is becoming increasingly unsustainable. It wouldn’t take a large number of cases to push us to the point where we would have to start making decisions about whether we boot the 80 year old out of intensive care to make space for the 30 year old. Few people, these days, have experience of making those kinds of decisions. It’s not a responsibility I relish. But if the pandemic does break out on a large scale it may change Western society’s outlook on these issues quite profoundly.
An informative article from here (translated using Google):
1. The road through the air
It’s called drip infection. When someone coughs or sneezes, drops into the air. If the person is infected, the virus follows with the drops. When you inhale them, you get the infection in you.
How far the droplets fly depends on how big they are. Up to one meter is a normal flight distance – and thus a suitable “safety distance” for sneezing persons (who should of course stop the shower with the arm fold).
Note that the corona virus is not an “airborne” infection where infectious substances remain longer in the air as particles, as in measles.
2. The way into the body
Many cold viruses get into your nose first and give you running nose. The new coronavirus appears to be rapidly descending into the airways, right down to the lungs.
Therefore, the disease covid-19 often begins with dry cough, followed by headaches and fever.
Therefore, the new virus also strikes extra hard against people who already have problems with the lungs. Mortality among smokers is seven times higher than average, according to researchers at Wuhan University.
3. The body’s self-defense
There are white blood cells in the blood that are equipped to deal with virus attacks. A functioning immune system means that we can manage infections much better than we would otherwise – even coronavirus.
When the Chinese Infectious Diseases Institute looked at data from 44,000 people with covid-19, it was found that 81 percent of them received only mild disease symptoms – as a common cold.
Fourteen percent became seriously ill, five percent required intensive care.
4. The attack in the lungs
In the lungs there are millions of small “alveoli” where the oxygen of the air is transferred to the blood.
The virus can damage the lung tissue so that fluid leaks into the alveoli and inhibits oxygen uptake. It becomes difficult to breathe.
Of the sickest patients in Wuhan, 31 percent had respiratory distress.
The most severe cases were “shock lung” or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This shortness of breath cost many of them life, despite respiratory care.
5. The looming death
The proportion of those who die is difficult to measure because all infected do not become ill and therefore do not fall into the statistics.
Of all registered cases of the new corona virus, 3.4 percent have died. The corresponding figure for last year’s Swedish seasonal flu was 3.7 per cent.
But the risk of dying from covid-19 varies dramatically between different groups.
6. The decisive age
Since 96 per cent of the infected and 98 per cent of the deceased are in China, the figures from there form the basis for the statistics. The risk of dying in covid-19 increases with age:
• No one under 9 has died; very few children have fallen ill.
• In the 10 to 39 age group, mortality is 0.2 percent. Of patients younger than 50 years, less than 0.5 percent have died.
• The highest mortality rate among people older than 80 is 14.8 percent.
7. The decisive health
The mortality rate of people who had no health problems when infected with the corona virus is 0.9 percent, according to statistics from Wuhan. But some health factors increase the risk.
• High blood pressure: 6 percent.
• Respiratory problems including coughing: 6 percent.
• Diabetes: 7 percent.
• Cardiovascular disease: 11 percent.
Sources: ECDC, Public Health Institute, Healthline, WHO, Worldometers.
to kwlf
so how do you explain the first greek casualty, based on your statistics. She was in her 30’s a well known fashion designer that participated in an italian fashion show last week and flew back to Greece infecting a few on the way and seem to be healthy on disembarking. She does not fit any of the categories mentioned above. But that is small sample. I wonder…
I’m not sure what there is to explain?
It sounds as if she was a healthy young person. The virus sometimes kills healthy young people. Dimme’s article gives a category – 10-39 – into which she fits and gives a predicted mortality of 0.2% within that age group.
