Which is almost 1.5x times the initial estimate, there's no foreseeable treatment against it, and it has far wider spread on top of that - the thing's already considered more severe than 2009's outbreak of swine flu. So, still pretty serious.
Swine Flu original estimated mortality rate:
0.02%
Swine Flu death toll found to have been
10-20x more than original estimates, with mortality rate somewhere around
0.2-0.4%, if going off of this discovery and assuming the original number of infected remained the same.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...th-rate-low-study-shows-idUSBRE90O0T720130125
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...-10-times-more-deadly-than-previously-thought
https://www.livescience.com/41539-2009-swine-flu-death-toll-higher.html
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I think i should elaborate more on my post above. The media is not entirely responsible for this but they accelerate it because they almost only tell you the bad facts like infected and death rates. They rarely tell you how the mortality rate is still going down as more people recover and how all these numbers must mean nothing to you if you are not already at risk like elderly, babies or with weak immune system.
Regarding Swine Flu:
"The results showed that 62 to 85 percent of those who died in the 2009 pandemic were younger than age 65. Usually,
seasonal influenza (not H1N1) has the worst effect on seniors; only 19 percent of seasonal-influenza deaths occur in people age 65 and younger.
"It is this 'signature age shift' that sets pandemic influenza apart from seasonal influenza," the researchers said. The high death rates in younger people mean a larger burden on the society as more potential years of human life were lost during the 2009 pandemic than during an average seasonal flu outbreak, the researchers said."
https://www.livescience.com/41539-2009-swine-flu-death-toll-higher.html
Regarding Swine Flu:
"But the current study, commissioned by the WHO, helps explain why the agency struggled so much to calibrate its response to that pandemic and find the right tone for its public messaging. WHO leaders were first
criticized for taking too long to declare a pandemic when spread of the disease clearly met its definition. Then critics charged the agency with hyping the situation under pressure from vaccine makers who wanted to recoup their investment."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...-10-times-more-deadly-than-previously-thought
Regarding Coronavirus:
"For weeks, it seemed that
the answer was 2. Perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less.
The calculation was made by comparing the total number of people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 to the number of people who died of it. As both of those numbers grew, the ratio was bound to shift.
The 2% figure seemed stable on Feb. 24, when a massive study of nearly 45,000 Chinese patients whose infections had been confirmed with laboratory tests reported a
case fatality rate of 2.3%.
Later that week, on Feb. 28, a study of nearly 1,100 Chinese patients suggested
a lower death rate, of 1.4%.
Four days later, on March 3, the World Health Organization said the
global mortality rate was 3.4%.
How could it have changed so much in such a short period of time?
“It’s hard to say what the case-fatality rates are until the dust settles,” said
Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco.
“It’s not a statistic to be looking at kind of on an ongoing basis, even though I do it just as much as everybody else does,” he admitted.
That includes members of Congress. On Wednesday, they asked
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, what was going on.
He urged them not to get so fixated on the fatality rate, emphasizing that scientists still have a lot to learn about it."
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-07/why-the-coronavirus-fatality-rate-keeps-changing
They rarely tell you how the mortality rate is still going down as more people recover and how all these numbers must mean nothing to you if you are not already at risk like elderly, babies or with weak immune system.
Sounds like the media explained it to me. The article goes into more depth.