CORONA VIRUS. Is it out of control?, page-1683

Hi Beer

The linked article is a good starting point IMHO.

We don't know the case fatality rate. IMHO whether it is 1% or 2 % or 10% may depend on what medical intervention the infected person receives.

The other wild card is the extent to which the virus may have mutated into more deadly and less deadly and perhaps mild strains. Mild to moderate cases may go completely unreported.

In China the quality of treatment will be extremely variable. In many parts of the world treatment will be either non existent or not go beyond some paracetamol.

That the virus seems to have been contained through quarantine restrictions in more advanced countries there is no way of containing it in many of the countries that border China. Consider where it might go in Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Nepal and of course India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, under developed former Soviet republics …. just for starters …… and then on to the ME and Africa. Indonesia and the New Guinea archipelago are also at high risk.

As posted I would consider a 2% case fatality rate to be potentially more severe than a 10% fatality rate because people with a milder virus will continue to walk around and spread it far and wide.

If there is any good news in this terrible mix it may be an observation that the Wuhan Corona virus only becomes really infectious just before symptoms appear. The thought that an individual could be highly infectious for maybe a week before symptoms arrived was terrifying.

Wandering thought the issues I note that there hasn't been an update on how infectious the virus actually is. Previous quotes indicated that everyone who got the virus would spread it to an average of 2.5 others.

A very percentage of people get moderate or corona virus colds each year. We deflect a lot of what goes around with nothing more than an itchy nose for a few hours because we have a resistance to human and many humanised versions of the virus. In the case of the 1918-19 influenza epidemics many older people who had been exposed to an earlier version of this hybrid bird/human flu didn't get sick. It was often the young, healthy people who died.

I have no idea as to how resistant populations may be to the Wuhan Corona virus because I don't know what if any human corona virus it has mixed with or the extent of the mix. I don't know.

Isolation and quarantine won't likely prevent anyone from ultimately being exposed to this virus but it may (hopefully) delay the inevitable until vaccines and other effective treatments become available.