This is a really serious problem that we have to take seriously.
I mean people always say well the flu you know the flu does this the flu does that but the flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent. While Corona has a mortality of ten times that.
all right estimates on the mortality rate for this new coronavirus have ranged anywhere from below one percent to three point, four percent slightly higher than the seasonal flu.
And as the New York Times points out, even a disease with a relatively low death rate that's the mortality rate can take a huge toll if enormous numbers of people catch it.
People are trying to figure out even the mortality rates obviously greater than the flu.
When we think about these rates we don't really understand how we get to
the numbers that we're getting in terms of the infection of this.
This coronavirus kovat 19 is more infectious than the flu.
It definitely seems to be spreading in a pattern that's similar to the flu but it may be more infectious than the flu.
It's going to attack more people than the flu because we have no population immunity to this so with the flu there are antibodies that people develop from a
vaccine from prior infections .
But this is a novel coronavirus and it will attack a large amount of the population
maybe 50% or more will get sick with this because it's totally new.
There may be carriers have a lot of the virus and that is what perhaps makes
them so infectious.
So when you think about how infectious you are to
other people one of the key factors is how much virus you shared and what we're
seeing with this coronavirus in.
Some of the studies is that it is a much higher viral load in your nasal secretions and in your runny noses and your sneezes then for example SARS.
SARS was something that was pretty easily contained well once people figured it
out but this is behaving more like the common cold causing corona viruses and
that's why we're seeing this accelerated spread all over the world.
Best thing is to identify those cases and then isolate those cases so they don't spread to other people. This is similar to what happened in South Korea where they actually have a low death rate around 0.6% that's the best way to do that.
If you allow people to be out there mingling with this you're going to
spread it and it's going to get into people that are high risk and then
you're gonna have higher mortality rates.
This is something that's going to be hard to contain it's not containable
through travel bans or airport screening or or quarantines if this is
something we really have to find the cases isolate them right and we have a
strange travel ban coming into effect.