The death rate is about 3% overall, which is the same as

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The death rate is about 3% overall, which is the same as the flu.

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Which virus is deadlier?

The coronavirus seems to be more deadly than the flu — so far.

On average, seasonal flu strains kill about 0.1 percent of people who become infected. The 1918 flu had an unusually high fatality rate, around 2 percent. Because it was so contagious, that flu killed tens of millions of people.

Early estimates of the coronavirus death rate from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, have been around 2 percent. But a new report on 1,099 cases from many parts of China, published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, finds a lower rate: 1.4 percent.

The coronavirus death rate may be even lower, if — as most experts suspect — there are many mild or symptom-free cases that have not been detected.

The true death rate could turn out to be similar to that of a severe seasonal flu, below 1 percent, according to an editorial published in the journal by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Dr. H. Clifford Lane, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But even a disease with a relatively low death rate can take a huge toll if enormous numbers of people catch it. As of Sunday, there were about 87,000 coronavirus cases and 3,000 deaths. This week, for the first time, the number of new cases outside China exceeded the number within the country.

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The latest tally of almost 1,100 cases of COVID-19 infection from 30 Chinese provinces shows a fatality rate of 1.4% during the early phase of the outbreak.

That's much higher than the rate seen with the seasonal flu, where only about 0.1% of cases end in death. But it's far below the mortality rate of recent coronavirus outbreaks like SARS (9 to 10%) or MERS (36%), noted Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Furthermore, the 1.4% figure cited in the new Chinese report, published Feb. 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine, is probably higher than the "real" death rate, Fauci added.

That's because many coronavirus cases are so mild they're not even being reported, Fauci explained in an editorial he co-wrote in the same issue of the NEJM. Co-authors include Dr. Robert Redfield, who directs the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Clifford Lane, deputy director of the NIAID.
"If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%," Fauci and his colleagues explained.

"This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza pandemic [which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%] or a pandemic influenza [similar to those in 1957 and 1968]," the experts wrote.

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As the coronavirus spreads, scientists are learning more about the disease’s fatality rate.

The medical journal JAMA released a paper this week analyzing data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention on 72,314 coronavirus cases in mainland China, the figure as of Feb. 11, the largest such sample in a study of this kind.

The sample’s overall case-fatality rate was 2.3%, higher than World Health Organization official 0.7% rate. No deaths occurred in those aged 9 years and younger, but cases in those aged 70 to 79 years had an 8% fatality rate and those aged 80 years and older had a fatality rate of 14.8%.

No deaths were reported among mild and severe cases. The fatality rate was 49% among critical cases, and elevated among those with preexisting conditions: 10.5% for people with cardiovascular disease, 7.3% for diabetes, 6.3% for chronic respiratory disease, 6% for hypertension, and 5.6% for cancer.

The fatality rate was 49% among critical cases and worsened among those with preexisting conditions.
The latest China-based study, which was not peer-reviewed by U.S. scientists, found that men had a fatality rate of 2.8% versus 1.7% for women. Some doctors have said that women may have a stronger immune system as a genetic advantage to help babies during pregnancy.

The Chinese study is likely not representative of what might happen if the global spread of the virus worsens, particularly as regards gender. In China, nearly half of men smoke cigarettes versus 2% of women, which could be one reason for the gender disparity.

Coronavirus has an incubation period of up to two weeks, helping the virus to spread. A previous study published in JAMA suggests some patients may be more contagious than others. One patient spread the virus to at least 10 health-care workers and four patients at a hospital in Wuhan.

“In this single-center case series of 138 hospitalized patients with confirmed novel coronavirus–infected pneumonia in Wuhan, China, presumed hospital-related transmission of 2019-nCoV was suspected in 41% of patients, 26% of patients received ICU care, and [the] mortality was 4.3%.”

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Death rate

So far this flu season, about 0.05% of people who caught the flu have died from the virus in the U.S., according to CDC data.

The death rate for COVID-19 appears to be higher than that of the flu.

In the study published Feb. 18 in the China CDC Weekly, researchers found a death rate from COVID-19 to be around 2.3% in mainland China. That's much higher than the death rate linked to flu, which is typically around 0.1% in the U.S., according to The New York Times.

Even so, the death rate for COVID-19 varied by location and an individual’s age, among other factors. For instance, in Hubei Province, the epicenter of the outbreak, the death rate reached 2.9%; in other provinces of China, that rate was just 0.4%. In addition, older adults have been hit the hardest. The death rate soars to 14.8% in those 80 and older; among those ages 70 to 79, the COVID-19 death rate in China seems to be about 8%; it’s 3.6% for those ages 60 to 69; 1.3% for 50 to 59; 0.4% for the age group 40 to 49; and just 0.2% for people ages 10 to 39. Nobody 9 and under has died of this coronavirus to date.

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Claim: ‘It is no more dangerous than winter flu’

Many individuals who get coronavirus will experience nothing worse than seasonal flu symptoms, but the overall profile of the disease, including its mortality rate, looks more serious. At the start of an outbreak the apparent mortality rate can be an overestimate if a lot of mild cases are being missed. But this week, a WHO expert suggested that this has not been the case with Covid-19. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and the country’s response, said the evidence did not suggest that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make Covid-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.