Covid-19 is rapidly spreading. According to the latest figures, 2,995 people worldwide succumbed to the new coronavirus this year. That is a lot, but still considerably less than 80,815, or the number of people in the world who died this year due to the typical seasonal flu.
The figures come from worldometers.info. This website pours real-time information into various counters, ranging from the number of e-mails sent today worldwide to the number of deaths due to famine.
The outbreak of the new coronavirus also prompted the independent organization to cast the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 into a counter. The results are set against the number of victims of the ‘common’ seasonal flu.
This shows that since the start of 2020, many more people have died from the ‘common’ flu (80,815 deaths) than from the new coronavirus (2,996 deaths).
The symptoms of the new coronavirus are similar to those of a ‘normal’ seasonal flu. A significant difference, however, is that a vaccine against the coronavirus does not yet exist. Moreover, we don’t yet know how the coronavirus behaves, which also requires extra caution.
It is hard to say how deadly Covid-19 is in the end. According to the official counts, around 2.4 percent will eventually die from the disease. But that number is actually too high because of the high mortality in the Chinese source of fire Wuhan (4 percent) raises the average. Remove the Hubei province from the counts, and the mortality is ‘only’ 0.4 percent, and outside China 0.25 percent.
All those numbers are still in motion, because there are still seriously ill people in the hospital, but also because there are believed to be many patients with mild symptoms that are not in the statistics. The ‘pie’ of infected patients would then be more extensive than expected, and the percentage of deaths, therefore, smaller – a phenomenon that occurs more often with new diseases.
With the current mortality, the new disease would be in line with the Spanish flu of 1918, which was also fatal in about 1 to 2 percent of cases. By comparison, the ‘common’ seasonal flu killed about 0.1 percent of the patients, while lung disease SARS was fatal in 9.6 percent of cases.
