Coronavirus Update

Coronavirus is looking worse than it was when I posted on it some days ago.

It is one thing when the Chinese government takes draconian measures; that may be political. But other countries are now imposing a quarantine on China: Japan, Russia, Italy, the US, Australia, all have shut their borders to people coming from China. Australia has evacuated its own nationals, not to Australia proper, but to Christmas Island for quarantine. It sounds as though their own medical advisors are alarmed.

At the same time, as I did not at first realize, and others also may not, we do not know yet how deadly the disease may be. The fatality rate looked like less than 2%, but that is deceptive. Because the virus is so fast-moving, the great majority of cases at any given time have not run their course. So we cannot just compare the ration of infections to deaths. When we look at the ratio of deaths to recoveries, we are looking at something more like a 50% fatality rate. The final truth could be anywhere between those two figures.

Because the virus is unusually infectious, health facilities could also become swamped, as seems to have happened in Wuhan, so that people go untreated.

It is beginning to look as though this will be a major disaster for China, at least.