Practical Tips to Prepare for the Coronavirus

Keep calm, and wash your hands

Dana G Smith
Elemental

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Photo: Isabel Pavia/Getty Images

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CCoronavirus is here. “We’ve reached a point at the outbreak where people need to start paying attention,” says Catharine Paules, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Penn State Health. “Do I think people need to change what they’re doing in daily life right this second? No. But I think that people need to be watching the outbreak very carefully and paying attention to things that the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health are advising them.”

A new virus is scary, and COVID-19 can be deadly, but so far it’s only been lethal in a small percentage of people. Currently, the death rate is estimated at 2.3% in Wuhan, China and 0.7% for the rest of the world. For comparison, the death rate for MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), another coronavirus, is 34.4%, while the death rate for flu is roughly 0.1%. However, tens of thousands of people in the U.S. die annually from the flu but not from MERS because the influenza virus is much more contagious — up to 10% of the population are projected to get the flu every year, and that’s even with a vaccine available.

COVID-19 appears to be as contagious as the flu, and there’s currently no vaccine for the virus…

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Dana G Smith
Elemental

Health and science writer • PhD in 🧠 • Words in Scientific American, STAT, The Atlantic, The Guardian • Award-winning Covid-19 coverage for Elemental