I have not find reason for optimist in the current situation.
I'm not an epidemiologist, just a simple medical student, so I don't know all the numbers, I'm only telling you what I'm told by staff and residents who find this reaction overblown. We'll have thousands of people showing up to emergency for this and they'll delay care for people who are in higher need for acute care. People raiding supplies at Costco and stealing N95 masks in the hospitals in ridiculous. From what I could find, there are approximately 80k reported cases in China and 10k outside, with death rates varying from 0.5 to 4% depending on the countries. Again, it's not something to take lightly, but given how people go to work with the flu which can be extremely dangerous if not taken care of properly, this whole situation is a bit extreme. People don't vaccinate their children against measles and pertussis, but they go crazy over this? It's sad.
Here, if you won't believe me, maybe this guy who's worked all his life with deadly infections will:
Confirmed cases are not important because the ones not recovered can not be part of the statistic.
Haha amen brother, or cigarette smoking, or cardiovascular diseases... 50% percent of smokers will actually die from smoking related illnesses, that's a real number, 50%. I'll hop on a plane to Wuhan without any protection and lick my fingers every second after shaking hands with thousands of strangers way before starting to smoke... and yet we are going crazy because of this virus but we let people spend money to kill themselves slowly... makes sense.
I'm pretty sure the ratios we currently have are actually worst case scenario since for 80% of people, this infection only causes cold like symptoms and these people are unlikely to go get tested for a runny nose. Once you recover completely from a viral infection, you don't become sick again from this particular strand, you've built adaptive immunity and this is how vaccines work. Obviously there is a chance the virus mutates and then yeah, you could get infected again by a different strand, which is why we can't get rid of the common cold of flu completely.
Has nothing to do with the rate of deaths nor the propagation.
Protecting the health care system doesnt mean there will be millions of deaths.
I'm not here to tell you what to think, you obviously can make your own opinion. I've told you what I know and what the healthcare professionals that surround me know about this. Yes, it propagates very fast, but it is not close to being as deadly as SARS or MERS. The vast vast vast majority of healthy people will not have any problems with it if they contract it, those more at risk, as per usual, are the elderly and the immunosupressed. There are a lot of antivirals that are being tested, one from here that was isolated by a lab at the IRCM and they are conducting clinical trials in China right now. If you still want to think that this will kill millions, I can't force you to think otherwise, just like I can't convince anti-vaccers that they're playing with their children's lives. All I can tell you is that Monday I'll be at the hospital all day, not wearing a mask unless told to do so, and that I am not scared at all to die from this thing. You decide where you wanna go with it, I have to study now.
How many deaths in Iran do you expect? This is already affecting more than 20 MPs in Iran.
Death rate of Flu os 0.1%.
