Thread by @bopinion

Just how deadly is the coronavirus? We made three charts to help amateur epidemiologists understand more
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Ebola has a 50% death rate. If you got infected, you’d most likely die.
Covid-19 has a 3.4% death rate. Obviously not as bad as Ebola—but that makes it up to 34x more deadly than the seasonal flu trib.al/EO09fxA

Fatality rates can change a lot depending on time, place & access to treatment:
- Death rates go higher if hospitals are overwhelmed, as happened in Hubei, China where Covid-19’s spread began
- Factoring in mild unreported cases brings the death rate down trib.al/EO09fxA

During the severe flu season of 2017-18 there were 61,099 flu-related deaths and 44.8 million cases in the U.S.
A Covid-19 outbreak of similar size in the U.S. with a 1% death rate results in some scary numbers:
600,000 deaths
8 million hospitalizations
trib.al/EO09fxA

The worst part is Covid-19 could really spread as widely as the flu, and it could be twice as contagious.

That’s because it seems the virus can spread quite a bit before symptoms occur, though how much is still up in the air trib.al/EO09fxA

The good news is that there are things we can do to reduce the R0 of a virus:
🚪 Quarantining infected people
🤜🤛Replacing handshakes with fist bumps
🧼Frequent hand-washing

China’s draconian lockdown approach has helped keep the disease in check.
But what happens when people go back to their normal lives? World leaders need to weigh the costs of particular interventions
trib.al/EO09fxA