As I write this (18Mar2020) the deaths from the Novel Coronavirus have risen to just under 9000 worldwide, 150 in the US. China appears to be the only country that has a declining number of new cases, after draconian measures sharply reduced the spread of the disease. They so far have had just under 81,000 cases, nearly 70,000 of them have recovered.
The incubation period is between 2 and 14 days, with a peak between 3 and 7. The disease itself seems to last about 2 weeks if symptoms are mild, 3-6 weeks if they're severe. Severe cases seem to become severe about one week from the onset of symptoms. The cause of death seems mostly to be hypoxia (shortness of breath: can't get enough oxygen into the blood), either from the disease itself or from opportunistic infections, mostly pneumonia.
The symptoms start out with malaise, muscle pain and low-grade fever, sharpening to higher fever and a dry cough. Oddly, very few cases seem to have a runny nose, sneezing or sore throat. The patients that do have these symptoms seem to have simultaneously had a cold or some other issue.
The death rate for previously healthy patients is under 1%. Heart disease, Diabetes, Chronic Respiratory disease, Hypertension and Cancer multiply the death rate by 7-14x.
The worst case scenario I've seen is that we will need nearly 1 million medical ventilators at the peak of the crisis. There are presently about 160K, about 100K of them obsolete but could be used in an emergency. The problem is not just the disease itself. The US loses about 2.8M people a year. The top causes are Heart disease (650K), Cancer (600K) Accidents (170K), Chronic Respiratory diseases (160K), Stroke (146K). Normally, something like a million people a year require a ventilator--about 60K at a time. If at the peak of the crisis, we need 150K ventilators, we will only lose 30K of them. A terrible catastrophe, but small on the scale of heart disease and so forth. It's obviously cold comfort if one of them is someone you cared about. If, at the peak of the crisis, we need 500K ventilators, we will lose nearly 400K. A great many of them will be people who never had coronavirus at all, but did have a life threatening condition that required medical assistance and/or ventilation.
The appallingly terrible response by the Trump administration has made the problem much worse than it needed to be. China sprang into action very aggressively and used many tools which are not really available in the US. China may manage to keep its deaths under 5,000. While they've only had about 3000 deaths so far, Italians are dying at over 450 a day and it's unlikely this will slow down for some time. They have 35K cases and had 4200 new ones today. Extrapolating the curve looks like 30-50K deaths. The US is much bigger and our response has been in many ways worse.
e.g.: Trump poo poohed the problem and did literally nothing for over a month.
The original tests provided by the CDC were defective and there are still far too few tests available. This cost us a month or more.
He fired the team of advisors that would have been the most useful in 2018--apparently because they were warning him that something like this might happen.
He's given a very mixed message on the border controls, such as announcing that all trips from Europe except the UK (where he owns resorts) would be cancelled, triggering panic travel, massively overwhelming the medical checks for re-entry. If any one of those people actually did have the disease, there are now a thousand new vectors, and sure enough, New York and California, which previously hadn't had many cases, immediately because major centers. If you're going to close the border, close it completely and immediately. Better yet: leave the border open, and be prepared to maintain distancing while you're doing your entry checks on what would be normal travel levels. He got this exactly backwards.
There are lots of other terrible problems. I rank the new coronavirus as only 3rd or 4th on the list, although its pressing and immediate. The most pressing, immediate problems is that we must remove Donald Trump and his toadies from power as soon as possible. I think when the accounting is done, Trump will have killed over a million Americans.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
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