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I've been watching this SARS thing since it was first reported.

Out of curiosity, I ran some numbers using 1918-1919 Spanish Flu (SF) numbers as a sort of baseline.

There are 6B people in the world.

20% of the worlds population got the SF.

Yes, this could be extremely low because of two facts, today's rapid transportation, and in HK, in some places you look at number of contacts and number of cases (WHO's numbers) and infection is running in the 90's percentile-wise. But 20% is a start.

That would mean that 1.2 B people would get it.

Mortality rate is running somewhere around 4.5%.

Yes, that's low because as soon as the medical facilities are overwhelmed that will soar. I wish we could get some real numbers out of China, it would give us a much better idea.

So, as a conservative estimate, 540,000,000 people would die. 540 million.

Food for thought. The less conservative numbers are, of course, even more mind-boggling.