Having the news encourage people.. or even freaking them out a bit so they avoid travel, crowds and public places for the next few weeks will do a lot of good in slowing down rates of new infections.
Comparing COVID-19 to the seasonal flu is implying that infection rates and fatality rates are the same. This is NOT incorrect.
COVID-19 may transmit closely to the normal flu, but fatality rates are much higher!
Rereading my post i thought i should have clarified ;)
I do not disagree at all with actions taken to counter it, closing events, people staying at home and so on. I live in Europe so i am all for those measures since we do not have borders control between member states.
I simply note that people are overreacting. Stockpiling a bit for a few weeks is ok, but massively rushing to the store is a side effect of this constant babbling in the news. People should have been educated properly on how to react and not to do it by instinct of survival. Thousands of business have already and will suffer because of that. In France we had shortage of medical supplies because people went massively buying masks, disinfectant and so on, when masks are most useful to not spread the virus if you are yourself infected, not the opposite. The state had to put a ban on those product for public so hospitals do not go too low with their stocks.
And again fatalities ratio are based on the known infected figure. Aside from those 80k that have been infected in China, how many have never been reported, not even speaking of tested there before early February policy change in the counting ? There were so many news in early January of people being repressed from going to the hospital in China. Who can know from those people those that were infected by Covid, or those by the flu?
Till this month, Russia and India had only 2 cases reported, do you think this is realistic considering the close business ties between those countries with China? Kazakhstan is still at 0, Ukraine at 1 for 2 months, Turkey 1. In Myanmar it is still zero. In almost all countries over the world that have lacking health infrastructures it is still zero. Less than a handful were reported in whole Africa still in February (only in Egypt then), when China has huge interest there and no travel ban were in place from those countries with China.
On the other hand, once the virus has reached Europe, we had a spike after a few weeks, because the health system is much more efficient to measure that.
Considering this, if you multiply the actual figure in China just by 10, or put in the balance all those countries that have almost close to zero infected but that have very close ties to China, the math changes. I guess we will know better what the fatality ratio is next year since specialists say it will come back next winter again, and by then we will be more prepared probably.
www.reuters.com
