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17 Mar 2020  (359 Views) 
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Covid-19 crisis


Will the corona virus cause 150 million deaths a year?
Someone said that if the corona virus infect every one on earth and the fatality rate is 2%, it will lead to 150 million deaths, out of a world population of 7.5 billion.

The reasoning is probably flawed.

There is one big statistic that is not known. Of the infected people, how many will have symptoms that lead to their being treated in hospital?

Let me guess that this is 1%. Maybe for 99%, it never reach that stage. The body got rid of the virus somehow.

So, out of 7.5 billion people who are infected, 75 million will need to be hospitalized. A 2% fatality rate will be 1.5 million deaths. A 4% fatality rate will be 3 million deaths.

This assumes that the virus is so infectious that it reach to everyone in the globe.

Each year 3 million people die from pneumonia anyway. Maybe, they have been killed by a germ similar to the corona virus all these years, but we did not know about it.

10 million people die from cancer. So, the corona virus cannot compete with cancer.

It is possible that I have under estimated that only 1% of the infected person reach the stage that need hospitalization. It could be 5 to 10 times of my estimate. Let us wait to see the actual deaths or hospital admissions shoot up to shocking numbers before believing in the 150 million figure.

I will start to worry when the deaths from the corona virus reach 100,000 a year.

Tan Kin Lian
 


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