As Coronavirus Explodes in China, Countries Struggle to Control Its Spread

In any case, flu spreads worldwide every year, infecting tens of millions of people.

And the spread of the new coronavirus is starting to resemble that of seasonal flu, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“I think we have to revisit which model we’re really using, and I think we really over the past week and a half have come closer to the influenza model,” Dr. Osterholm said. “Trying to stop influenza in a community without vaccine is like trying to stop the wind. I don’t know how we’re going to stop this.”

He added, “The only thing operating in our favor is at least it doesn’t appear to be as severe as SARS or as MERS.”

Among patients with the Wuhan coronavirus, about 20 percent have become seriously ill, and the rest have a mild illness, the W.H.O. said at a news briefing on Wednesday. So far, the death rate appears to be about 2 percent, but that is not certain yet. Those who die tend to be older people with underlying ailments. The median age of the first 425 patients in China was 59, and a little more than half were male, according to a report published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

Diseases caused by related coronaviruses are deadlier: SARS killed 10 percent, and MERS about 35 percent.

But if the new virus were to spread even more widely and a 2 percent mortality rate continued, the death toll could be considerable. Seasonal flu, with a much lower overall death rate of 0.1 percent, kills more than half a million people worldwide every year. At least 8,200 people in the United States have died during this flu season, according to estimates from the C.D.C.

Roni Caryn Rabin contributed reporting for this article.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/health/china-coronavirus-outbreak.html?emc=rss&partner=rss