| | | Some more COVID-19 info for you:
"For the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, health officials estimate an incubation period of between one and 14 days. Most people start showing symptoms about five days after becoming infected, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)."
It's not yet clear whether people infected with the new coronavirus are very contagious during the incubation period, though there have been reports of people transmitting the virus without showing symptoms. It is also unclear what proportion of people catch the virus but never develop any symptoms. Based on data from China, the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) suggests that asymptomatic cases are rare. On the cruise ship the Diamond Princess, however, 392 of 705 cases were reported to be asymptomatic, the CDC reported.
And now for a back of envelope calculation:
"The 61,099 flu-related deaths in the U.S. during the severe flu season of 2017-2018 amounted to 0.14% of the estimated 44.8 million cases of influenza-like illness. There were also an estimated flu-related 808,129 hospitalizations, for a rate of 1.8%. Assume a Covid-19 outbreak of similar size in the U.S., multiply the death and hospitalization estimates by five or 10, and you get some really scary numbers: 300,000 to 600,000 deaths, and 4 million to 8 million hospitalizations in a country that has 924,107 staffed hospital beds. Multiply by 40 and, well, forget about it. Also, death rates would go higher if the hospital system is overwhelmed, as happened in the Chinese province of Hubei where Covid-19’s spread began and seems to be happening in Iran now. That’s one reason that slowing the spread is important even if it turns out the disease can’t be stopped."
PS The most likely R0 value for COVID-19 is 2.3. This makes is more contagious than the Spanish Flu (estimated at 2.0). And as I said before, these numbers are exponential factors, so a little difference in R0 makes a huge difference in the number of people who catch it. |
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