Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and director of the school’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, helped lead one of the two teams that first calculated the reproductive number of SARS in the 2002-2003 outbreak.
The disease appears to be transmitting pretty effectively, probably in Korea, probably in Japan, and probably in Iran.” He has estimated that 40 to 70 percent of the adult global population will eventually become infected.
That said, “Infected is different from sick,” he is careful to point out. “Only some of those people who become infected will become sick.” As noted above, only about 1 percent to 2 percent of those who have become sick thus far have died, he says. But the number of people who are infected may be far greater than the number of those who are sick. “In a way,” he says, “that’s really good news. Because if every person who had the disease was also sick, then that would imply gigantic numbers” of deaths from the disease.
https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/02/fighting-sars-2
Great Post - I missed that
There’s a doctor in Britain that has been monitoring this as well. He’s concerned that the number of ‘Serious or Critical’ cases is increasing, relative to the overall number of cases - he believes a more virulent strain has developed; same thing happened with the Spanish Flu - it was the Third Outbreak of the Spanish flu that killed the most people.
Bttt!
Plus China is not reporting new cases. As the virus spreads eastward though Afghanistan and then to the rest of the middle east (with very little medical infrastructure in some of those regions), maybe we are past the point of pretending we can contain it.