China reported the first cases of coronavirus on Dec. 31, and within a few days, there were 44 of them. As of Friday, according to the World Health Organization, there were 83,694 confirmed cases spread across 53 countries, which have resulted in 2,861 deaths. While it would be counterproductive for Americans to go into full-blown panic mode, there is also a danger of the population becoming too flippant and disregarding the best advice of scientists and public health officials.
As scientists continue to learn more about the fast-moving virus, there has been a lot of focus on the fact that for most people, the infection is relatively minor. Many people have downplayed the potential for a catastrophic event by citing the statistic that an estimated 2.3% of the confirmed cases have resulted in fatalities.
Talk show host Rush Limbaugh used that number to argue that the media were overhyping the virus as part of the latest effort to take down President Trump. He explained coronavirus was nothing more than the common cold. “The survival rate of this is 98%!” Limbaugh told his millions of listeners. “You have to read very deeply to find that number, that 2% of the people get the coronavirus die. That’s less than the flu, folks.”
But 2.3% is actually more than the seasonal flu, which carries a fatality rate of 0.1%. That means that if the current fatality estimates are correct, the coronavirus is more than 20 times as deadly as the common flu. So, 2% is not a small number in this context. Few people would get on an airplane, drive a car, or engage in any activity if they thought there was a 1-in-50 chance of them dying as a result.
Furthermore, the 2.3% figure is not equally distributed among age groups. While younger people have a very high survival odds, they get lower the older patients are. According to a study from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, of about 45,000 confirmed cases, the fatality rate was 0.2% for those under 40, but went up to 3.6% for those in their 60s, 8% for those in their 70s, and 14.8% for those 80 and over. So while younger people with no major health issues might like their odds, their parents or grandparents are in a high-risk category — with 1 in 7 confirmed cases dying.
There are arguments for why the fatality rate may be lower. The biggest is that the statistic we have only measures deaths among those who have been confirmed to have coronavirus. It turns out that some people who get coronavirus only have mild cases, and others show no symptoms at all. If it turns out that the overall number of cases has been underestimated, then the death rate could be lower than it appears now.
There is, however, a flip side to that. As James Hamblin explained at the Atlantic, one of the reasons that more deadly diseases with fatality rates of 60% have been able to be contained, is that “infected people can be identified and isolated, or that they died quickly.” In contrast, coronavirus has been found to have an incubation period as high as 24 days, and some have only a mild form of it. That means that they are going about their business without knowing they’re infected, allowing them to infect other people, thus allowing the disease to spread more rapidly. Thus, any disease that is more deadly than the flu but can spread quickly has the potential to have catastrophic results.
In Japan, the rapid spread of the virus has shut down schools for a month. And in the United States, the number of cases has been low, in part, because states are just building up the capacity to test people. “By the end of next week, we should have the the capacity to test 10,000 Americans a day,” former Trump FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNBC. “Once we have that capacity in place and doctors are ordering more tests, we’re going to find more positives.”
Acknowledging the likelihood that things are going to get worse before they get better is not about stoking alarmism. Quite the contrary. People are more likely to be scared when more cases inevitably arise if they’re lead to believe that there’s nothing to worry about. This is not a time for panic, but for the public to understand that coronavirus is a big deal.
