Too many unknowns with this thing. It could fade away after this year or become a yearly seasonal illness. It could mutate into something less deadly or just the opposite. My fear is it subsides during warm weather like the flu but comes back in the fall even worse after people have let their guard down.
That reproductive rate and the fact that it spreads while incubating before symptoms have manifest make it extremely likely this will catch.
We're starting to see better epidemiological data as well. There are 40,894 confirmed currently infected (likely significantly higher if it were possible to count nonconfirmed) of which 7,375 are in intensive care units (critical cases) which is 18%. This number is hard to rely on due to the difficulty in confirming all cases. There are likely thousands (if not tens of thousands) of unreported mild cases. So we have a maximum number. We know that the
percentage of cases that become critical is not more than 18%.
The next piece of valuable epidemiological data we have going forward is similar. There are 48,181 confirmed cases that had outcomes. Of those, 3,053 were fatalities. This is about 6%, so we know that
the fatality rate is at a maximum 6% but again, there were likely many more unconfirmed cases which were mild and unreported which resulted in recovery.
www.theguardian.com
