The headline in The Atlantic initially seems alarmist:
You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus
but the evidence is starting to pile up that this may be the case.
Now we are still in the early days. Statistics are moving around in part because we don’t have reliable testing widely deployed, but the best guesses so far are that COVID-19 has an infection rate, (R0), of about 2.28, which makes it 75% more infectious than the seasonal flu, and COVID has a mortality rate of 2%, which makes it 2000% deadlier than the flu.
COVID-19 is 75% more infectious and 2000% deadlier than the flu.
On Feb 25, 2020, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a news briefing:
It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen.
In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate 12,000-61,000 people die each year from the flu. If COVID-19 establishes a strong foothold in the US, multiplying those numbers by a factor of 20, we can expect 240,000-1,220,000 Americans to die each year from COVID-19.
1/4 million to 1.2 million Americans could die from COVID-19 each year.
Furthermore, COVID-19, like the flu, is an RNA virus, which means it mutates quickly making it hard to build up immunity to it or develop reliable vaccines for it. As an example, even though I’ve had the flu before and get a flu shot every year, I’ve had two of the worst flus in my life over the last 6 years.
From The Atlantic article,
The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”
Should these number come to pass, we should probably expect a number of lifestyle changes. As Dr. Messonnier says,
We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad.
Suggested steps (and which are in place in a number of locations outside the US already) include:
Closing schools
Cancelling meetings and conferences
Arranging for employees to work form home
Avoiding travel to certain locations (e.g., today CDC warned Americans not to travel to South Korea)
My guess is that international conferences are going to be some of the hardest hit, followed by some packed holiday locations including cruises and theme parks. Those in turn will impact air travel and the hotel industry. Gyms may suffer too with more people choosing to workout at home (Peloton anyone?). Health insurance rates may be going higher.
There are positive signs though.
Governments around the world are responding vigorously to COVID-19 with quarantines and other isolation efforts. Researchers are hard at work trying to develop treatments for those infected and vaccines to reduce the spread and severity of COVID-19. China quickly sequenced the virus’s DNA and provided the information to the world for analysis. We have never been better prepared to fight an infection.
Let’s hope these efforts pay off soon.