How Does the Coronavirus Compare to the Flu?

As new cases appear on the West Coast, some — including the president — see comparisons to the seasonal flu. Here’s a close look at the differences.

On average, seasonal flu strains kill about 0.1 percent of people who become infected. The 1918 flu had an unusually high fatality rate, around 2 percent. Because it was so contagious, that flu killed tens of millions of people.

Early estimates of the coronavirus death rate from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, have been around 2 percent. But a new report on 1,099 cases from many parts of China, published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, finds a lower rate: 1.4 percent.

The coronavirus death rate may be even lower, if — as most experts suspect — there are many mild or symptom-free cases that have not been detected.

The true death rate could turn out to be similar to that of a severe seasonal flu, below 1 percent, according to an editorial published in the journal by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Dr. H. Clifford Lane, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The coronavirus death rate may be even lower, if — as most experts suspect — there are many mild or symptom-free cases that have not been detected."

This is a factor that most aren't taking into account.Estimating fatality rates in the middle of an outbreak is very difficult, as infection confirmation is usually not available right away, recoveries lag deaths, we don’t know the actual full time of infection to resolution, and idiots like the WHO count all current infections as recoveries for their calculations.

Additionally, in this case it is even more difficult for two major reasons: people appear to be infectious even with no symptoms presented so it’s even m,ore difficult to get your true case number; and China can be trusted as far as I can throw my truck. So their numbers can’t really be used, and the non-Chinese numbers are so small as to be statistically essentially irrelevant.

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People who are immune/resistant generally aren’t included in the numbers, as they never get sick enough to even go to the doctor. CFR is actually lower.

Likewise, people with mild symptoms might not see the doc, or are misdiagnosed with something minor and recover on their own. CFR is actually lower.

People die from other things during the course of infection, even though the virus would have killed them. CFR is slightly higher.

Chinese reporting is completely fake numbers, and given the random reports of everything (tons of dead, massive quarantines, industrial cities shut down for Lunar New Year, large quantities of incinerations, etc) they likely have much more dead than they admit to. Hell, I doubt they even know what the real numbers are. CFR is much higher than reported.

Chinese (actual) cases are inflated due to smoking rates, poor medical facilities, and massive pollution. While CFR is higher than China reports, the worldwide rate should be lower than the hidden real Chinese one. CFR is ±.

Misdiagnoses because of lack of proper facilities. Affects CFR both ways, but likely mostly for recoveries. Probably lower than the official number.

As I mentioned above, recoveries lag deaths. So over the course of the disease, your fatality rate will increase, level off, then come down as the death number goes up sooner than the recovery number. So during the outbreak, the CFR will almost always calculate to higher than it actually is.

Also, our numbers are extremely small. Singapore has ~100 infections. So each death/recovery affects the rate by ±1%. If they happen to get lucky and infect a bunch of resistant people, or unlucky and it’s a bunch of likely-to-die folks, that happenchance will greatly affect their rate. BUT, if we look at South Korea, they have ~3000 cases. Each case moves the rate by .03%. So they need 30 people to be the odd super-susceptible or super-resistant to have the same effect (±1%) on the rate as a single person in Singapore. And when we’re looking at millions of people in a country, or billions worldwide, those tiny samples have margins of error that are probably .01-99%. As macabre as it sounds, we NEED a LOT more cases to get a decently accurate number.

I’ve seen some “outside China” rates estimates of 0.7%...combination of demographics, available care, and age/health of those infected will be deciding factors.

So far, the facts we have 9as we know them) and the “Panic....NOW!” stories aren’t connecting.

The current John Hopkins numbers have 3,044 deaths and 45,074 recoveries. This gives us a total CFR of 6.3%.

If we look at the non-Chinese numbers, we should get a (somewhat) more accurate picture since the Chinese numbers are completely bogus. That currently has 132 deaths, with 617 recoveries. So our current, non-Chinese fatality rate is at 17.6%.

Your .7% is WAY off, as even if we use incorrect math and take deaths / cases, we have 132/9046 giving us an incorrect death rate of 1.46%. Double what yours is, so where is that number coming from?
So right now we have a range of 1.4-17.6% for the fatality rate, and that's crazy high for a virus that's as infectious as this one appears to be. Not to mention reports coming out of people getting re-infected, or the major study that said total time from symptoms to resolution was 28 days, so the total case time is 5-6 weeks, not less-than 14 days like all the quarantines are set up to be.

Hopefully we get lucky and it magically doesn't spread much, but I don't think that's gonna happen. We do have better air, health habits, medical facilities, etc. here, so we'll definitely have a lower CFR than China (their real one, not the official numbers they put out), but I still see us hitting around 5-10%, once this is all over.

If your numbers were right, every country would be setting up huge quarantine camps and putting walls and barbed wire around them.....politicians would be fleeing and going into hiding.

My numbers come from the Johns Hopkins CoVid-19 tracker, which is the most accurate ones I know of. Perhaps you have a source that is better? If so, please share it!

And yes, it sounds like this has a lot of potential to do some bad things, and many governments should be taking it a bit more seriously. But when your total case load is so low, even the high percentages don't matter much until infection levels (confirmed cases) start going up a bunch. I guarantee that if you start seeing confirmed case numbers jumping here, the CDC will definitely start getting a lot more panicky. Iran is already trying to shut down alot of their pilgrimmage stuff, Italy is cancelling a lot of major stuff (Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt's new movie shooting?), I don't even know what all SKorea is doing, but I bet they're taking it more seriously than we are. And these places only have several hundred to a couple thousand cases. Not even that officially widespread yet.

Over time, that 17% figure should drop, but that's what the numbers currently are. The math doesn't make stuff up.

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