Am I the only one who doesn't really get the ... hype, for lack of a better word, about the novel coronavirus outbreak? (For the record, I had the same feeling back when SARS happened.) I mean, I understand that it is a new and unknown virus with no known working treatment, and seemingly like SARS it seems to kill the young and relatively healthy to a much higher degree than other large-scale viruses. It also has a quite high mortality rate. That's all understandably worrying. My issue is scale and actual infection rate. The latest numbers I've seen (yesterday, so probably higher now) were around 35 000 infected total and about 800 dead - and that's with the outbreak originating in a major city, the disease spreading mainly in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and with the start of the outbreak coinsiding with a major national holiday with lots of long-distance travel on packed planes and trains. Now compare this to bog-standard influenza, which the
CDC estimated infected between 22 and 31
million people in the US alone (up to almost 10% of the population!) between October 1st 2019 and February 1st 2020. Yes, this is 4x the time compared to nCov-2019, but still - that's a few orders of magnitude higher, no? The estimated death toll there - again, in the US alone - is 12 000 to 30 000 people. For a country with less than 1/3 the population of China, and much less concentrated at that. I understand that this translates to a mortality rate of something like 0,0014 or (much) lower, but ... that doesn't matter much when its total death toll is 15-35 times higher, does it? I also know the current influenza season has been rather severe (partly due to the vaccine this year apparently not being especially effective), but the CDC still
noted last year that 12 000 deaths was a low point in the 2012-2019 period (with peak numbers reaching 79 000).
With all this said, I would obviously be careful and take precautions if I lived in an area with a known coronavirus outbreak. And I understand that something like this does indeed look quite scary - it's a new and unknown disease that's killing people, after all. That much is obvious. But I still don't see how this warrants a global health crisis on this scale when its actual effects are so small when compared to seasonal illnesses that we take entirely for granted. I mean, there's no treatment for influenza either, just a vaccine (with varying efficacy) - beyond that hospital care essentially consists of ensuring you get enough nutrients and fluids for your immune system to keep fighting, while trying to avoid secondary infections. I might just be naively optimistic, but given reports of already dropping infection rates I have trouble thinking this will end up being anything much more dramatic than SARS was - which, in the grand scheme of things, was barely a blip. When you are announcing a global crisis for a possible pandemic and the total death toll ends up at just 774 people (
according to Wikipedia), something is off. I also get that it's much, much better to be safe than sorry about these things, but the response still feels wildly disproportionate.
/rant