The data come from the Coronavirus from John Hopkins University which keeps a daily count since January 20 and from the Wikipedia page 2019-20 coronavirus outbreak for the data between January 16 and January 20; for SARS, we started the graph at the start of the WHO count on March 17, 2003 (which does not take into account the time between the first case and the explosion of the epidemic).
Relatively low case fatality rate
To assess the danger of a virus, epidemiologists use several indicators. The first is “lethality”, that is to say the ratio between the number of deaths and the number of clinical cases observed.
At the beginning of February, this rate was 2% for the coronavirus, it is now around 3.3%, with 2,705 deaths for 80,350 cases observed on February 25.
This is less than SARS, which claimed 774 lives for 8,096 people infected between November 2002 and summer 2003, with a mortality rate of 9.7%; the coronavirus ranks far behind Ebola (50%), avian flu or bubonic plague at 60% mortality rate.
–
