Coronavirus Outbreak: All the Secrets Revealed About the Covid-19 Pandemic. A complete Rational Guide of its Evolution, Expansion, Symptoms and First Defense

How Deadly Is The Virus?
It is still hard to know. Perhaps the fatality rate is less than 3 per cent,
however, much fewer than SARS. This is one of the utmost significant
factors, and one of the least known, in how destructive the outbreak will be.
Assessing the lethality of a new virus is challenging. The worst cases are
usually first identified which may distort our perception of how patients are
likely to die. Around one third of Wuhan's first 41 patients had to be treated

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in an ICU, many with fever symptoms, serious cough, shortness of breath and
pneumonia. But people with mild cases are never allowed to visit a doctor.
There may be more deaths than we know therefore, and the death rate may be
smaller than we initially thought.
At the same time there may be underreported deaths from the virus. The
Chinese cities at the heart of the outbreak are facing a shortage of test kits
and hospital beds, and many sick people could not see a doctor. There is still
a lot of uncertainty about the existence of this virus and what it is doing.
Early indications show that the fatality rate for this virus is significantly
lower than that of another corona virus, MERS, which kills about 35 per cent
of infected people, and SARS, which kills about 10 per cent. All the diseases
tend to bind on proteins on the lung cell surface, but MERS and SARS seem
to be more harmful to lung tissue.
Of China's 17,000 people infected, 82% had moderate infections, 15% had
severe symptoms, and 3% were listed as critical. Lower than 2 percent had
died from confirmed infections. Many of those that died were elderly men
with underlying health issues. The virus causes serious respiratory disease
(i.e., pneumonia) and death from mild symptoms. Many deaths occurred in
people over the age of 65 and who were also suffering from another chronic
condition or illness. Data suggest a case-fatality rate of about 2 percent
(meaning 2 deaths out of every 100 confirmed cases), even though it is still
too early to give a reliable cipher. If the number of undiagnosed
asymptomatic cases or cases with very mild symptoms turns out to be high it
could be lower. If the virus mutates, it could intensify. In any case, the
fatality rate tends to be smaller than that of SARS (10%), and higher than that
of seasonal flu (less than 0.01%).