The response has been based on projections
Though the number of COVID-19 cases is increasing quickly, some of the precautions in the United States were taken before the disease reached pandemic proportions, based on projections.
“With COVID-19, the extreme measures of isolation and economic shutdown weren’t taken because of the number of deaths that occurred, but rather those that could happen,” explains Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD, an expert on medical decision-making.
For instance, during the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed around 50 million people worldwide, nobody knew the toll it would take, especially when it first began, she says. “As a decision scientist,
I was fascinated by how most world leaders treated the virus,” Miron-Shatz explains. “When it was in the bud, they ignored it. It’s because humans don’t deal well with small probabilities, or with probabilities in general. We tend to turn them into ‘all or nothing.’”
The fatality rates
The fatality rate is how we measure the ability of a virus to cause human deaths. Considering that the coronavirus is still spreading, we don’t have that figure yet.
“Reliable estimates of fatality are difficult to obtain, as it is affected by the provision of medical care, the number of people screened for mild disease, the age group that is targeted by the virus, and the extent of preventive measures adopted by a society,” says Naval Asija, MBBS, a physician and former epidemiologist based in India. “As these vary across countries, fatality also varies from low to very high.”
The overall fatality estimates of the new coronavirus can only be determined after the pandemic is officially over. However, some preliminary analysis suggests that the fatality rate of COVID-19 is higher than that of Ebola and Swine flu, but lower than that of the 1918 flu pandemic, according to Dr. Asija.
