Sasappis said:
So the death rate on the boat is 0% at this point, correct?
The first patients started showing symptoms 2 weeks ago, correct?
If so, this thing is looking more and more like a treatable and manageable virus than the global killer many here predicted.
The flu kills something like 1 in 700 in the US. That is usually the very sick or very old/young. This thing certainly may have a higher mortality rate than that within certain populations but it does not sound like it is an indiscriminate killer.
Is this a reasonable conclusion so far based on the numbers outside of China? I still think it is too early to stop worrying but I feel more optimistic today than a couple of weeks ago.
There's only enough detail to go off of a couple of case samples at this point. Based on those, the pneumonia part typically presented somewhere around 14-20 days out. So we're just entering the danger zone for those folks, based off of that.
The other ***** is that based off the CDC's Friday press conference, even those first three US cases (WA guy, and the husband/wife in Chicago) have not cleared the infection yet. Even though they are no longer presenting symptoms (for the WA guy that was two weeks ago) their excretions (saliva and nasal swabs) are still coming back positive for the virus. It's taking a long time for their immune systems to clear the bug, and they appear to still be capable of infecting others based on the viral loads they are finding in testing their mucous.
So it still feels early to declare no risk to us, though the current numbers outside of China and the ship of doom are definitely promising.