Originally Posted by Bob21 View Post

Kj, I checked the numbers and the death rate still stands at 7. This is for a population set that is highly skewed to old farts. And the infection rate was only 17%. This is for a population set with the crew inadvertently trying to give it to everybody for four weeks.

I’m on my phone so I can’t attach articles. But a couple good ones are: One is in nature.com and came out yesterday. The title is “what the cruise ship outbreak reveals about Covid-19.” Another good article is in Sciencenews.org. The title is “cruise ship outbreak helps pin down how deadly the new coronavirus is.”

Both articles indicate the death rate is closer to 0.5 percent, which means it’s worst than the flu but not this Armageddon scenario you and the press like to put out there. If we would let it run its natural course only about 20% of the population would even get infected (based on numbers from Diamond princess)

From what I can tell, this virus looks to be about 2 to 5 times more deadly than a serious flu outbreak. Obviously, not good but not some sort of major Armageddon crisis.
The sciencenews article is dated March 12. The nature.com article was "updated" March 26. BUT, both are still using numbers from much earlier. Sciencenews article even states "as of February 20" before it's data numbers. The articles may be updated, the data has not. They are both using Data that is several weeks old and does not include the 15 people that were in critical condition at the time.