Coronavirus: how dangerous is it? (Patreon)

Recently I’ve seen a lot of stuff overhyping the coronavirus, and a lot of stuff dismissing it as ‘not even as bad as a cold’. Now you have to be a little cautious when looking at figures here, as they will always be somewhat premature and somewhat inaccurate, nonetheless they are frequently useful for letting you know what sort of ball park you are in.

From this you get a unconstrained spread rate of about 1.5! This means an infected person has about a 50% chance of spreading it to someone else per day. The mortality rate is about 1%.  Those are definitely numbers that warrant significant efforts at containment. I was at first skeptical about China quarantining a city of ~10 million till I saw these numbers.  A spread rate of 1.5, if left unrestrained can infect the whole planet in a couple of months, and would leave millions dead. Thankfully the spread rate is down now to what looks more like a linear regime. In fact recent figures have the spread rate per day decreasing (there have still been something like 40 000 verified cases though)! This doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods yet though. You basically have to be vigilant till the warmer temperatures of summer acts as its own natural block to the spread of this thing.