Wuhan Coronavirus: How Contagious Is It? Transmission & Fatality Rates

How Contagious Is The Wuhan Coronavirus?

WUHAN CORONAVIRUS – In Mainland China, the outbreak of the virus has far surpassed the number of infected from SARS.

There have now been over 7,000 confirmed cases of the virus in China and at least 170 people have died from it.

Meanwhile, some experts have published their analysis on how contagious the epidemic actually is.

An epidemiologist from Harvard suggested that the new coronavirus scored a 3.8 in the reproductive R0 value. That meant the virus was “thermonuclear pandemic level bad”.

Meanwhile, according to an article from Worldometers, the R0 (reproductive value) of the virus is between 2.0 and 3.1.

In comparison, the R0 from the common flu is 1.3 and for the previous SARS epidemic, it was 2.0.

For the fatality rates, experts had an estimate of around 3%. However, as per the article, if you remove Hubei out of the equation, the national mortality rate drops to 0.3%.

Within the Hubei province, the mortality rate is about 1% when excluding the city of Wuhan which has a 5.5% mortality rate.

SARS had a mortality rate of 10% while MERS had a 34% mortality rate. In comparison, the common flue had a 0.01% mortality rate.

Because of this, the World Health Organization has categorized the risk assessment for the new Wuhan coronavirus as “very high” in China and “high” globally.

SARS (Nov. 2002 – Jul. 2003): a coronavirus that originated from Beijing, China, spread to 29 countries, with 8,096 people infected and 774 deaths (with a fatality rate of 9.6%).

SARS ended up infecting 5,237 people in mainland China, Wuhan Coronavirus surpassed SARS on January 29, 2020, when Chinese officials confirmed 5,974 cases of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

MERS (2012) killed 858 people out of the 2,494 infected (with a fatality rate of 34.4%).

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