Practical Tips to Prepare for the Coronavirus
Keep calm, and wash your hands
Follow Elemental’s ongoing coverage of the coronavirus outbreak here.
Coronavirus 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…
