How Many People Would Survive CoVID-19 / Coronavirus Disease?

Numbers from World Health Organization China Report 14th February

…Most people infected with COVID-19 virus have mild disease and recover. Approximately 80% of laboratory confirmed patients have had mild to moderate disease, which includes non-pneumonia and pneumonia cases, 13.8% have severe disease (dyspnea, respiratory frequency ≥30/minute, blood oxygen saturation ≤93%, PaO2/FiO2 ratio <300, and/or lung infiltrates >50% of the lung field within 24-48 hours) and 6.1% are critical (respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction/failure)…¹ *

Numbers from WHO Media Briefing 3rd March

… Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected…² **

The Lack of Leadership

In the face of coronavirus crisis if found it very concerning the way some governments take very serious actions without explaining the reasoning behind it to the wide public. I know it is so to reduce the panic but sometimes not-knowing could leave too much space for imagination. CoVID-19 outbreak is not an exception.

Why We Must Stay at Home

Some of you might already know, or simply did the math, but this data shows the potential damage this virus can cause in the worst-case scenario. The main reason we have to stay at home is to buy some time for the government to prepare more intense care beds. The reality is that most of the countries cannot withhold such an anschlag of patients requiring intensive care in order to survive.

How many lives we can save?

We are talking about saving lives. Staying at home and reducing the speed coronavirus spreads, literally, saves lives. If nothing is done, up to 6.1% of the population could die. If we provide all of them with the intensive care beds we could reduce this number to at least 3.4%, and hopefully more.

With these numbers, if everybody gets coronavirus disease we are talking about the difference between 45,225,400 and 25,207,600 casualties in Europe alone. Or in other words between the whole population of Spain and three times the entire population of Austria. Though it is very unlikely we will reach these numbers because there might be way more cases going around without any symptoms and I personally don‘t believe veryone will be infected with CoVID-19.

Mortality Rate of CoVID-19

Despite my disagreement with the given mortality number (simply because it is out-dated), I decided to go with the latest number from World Health Organization I could find. 3.4% from media briefing on 3rd March² which is in line with 3-4% in the situation report from 6th March.³ It is in line with my last week‘s calculation but the actual number might be higher now.

Finding reliable sources

I couldn‘t find a newer source but maybe there isn‘t one. I heard so many claims and seem many articles from respectable sources but neither of them is capable referencing a reliable source. Most of the time it is just ping pong between their own articles hoping that you‘ll just get busy trying to find the source.

There is so much content created about the coronavirus crisis and most of it is either bullshit or the echoes of the echoes of the echoes. So many opinions are similar to those used in climate change debates. Phrases like „consensus of doctors“ are being used but it is not the work of doctors to tell us the data. They have more important things to do than the work of researchers in their spare time. I wish that out of respect for their hard work most of us would spend some extra few minutes to critically review what we read every day.

Responsibility of a Writer

I‘ll try to cite only World Health Organization from now on as much as I can because using other numbers is just creating more variables in already extremely chaotic world by the recent world standards.

So one of the most important things all of us can do is not to spread the wrong information. Be skeptical about everything you read, my analysis including. (Just point it out if you notice something, I would appreciate it)

Conclusions

Nevertheless, providing exact numbers is not the point of this article. Any number in this area would over-flood the medical institutions of any given country. That would lead to the same actions taken by governments.

Share this if you feel like people in your country doesn‘t isolate as much as they should. It is only better for us as the sooner the outbreak shifts its direction the sooner lockdown will be lifted up.

Special Notice

This article was inspired by Mindaugas Gudelis, Lithuanian doctor from Spain who gave the calculations with 2% mortality rate a week ago in his vlog. 

* Numbers are from laboratory

** Numbers are based on 3rd March Cases/Casualties Worldwide ratio

Reference:

¹ https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf

² https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19—3-march-2020

³ https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200306-sitrep-46-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=96b04adf_2