Few days ago, it appeared the numbers were running about 4% mortality. But believing in data from China would be a mistake. Look at their actions. They have quarantined a city with 11 million. Who does that with a mortality rate of 4%?
Look at how this is spreading. I see it as a real threat to humanity since most of the world does not have health departments geared to prevent this. Today it is 20 countries. In one month, it will be 100 countries. Today 8,000+ are infected, one month from now, based on a spread rate we have seen, we could see 63 million infected by my calculation. Perhaps efforts to safeguard the population will slow the spread or halt it, but I do not see that happening. As long as we have people flying all over the world, and as long as this virus can incubate for two weeks without being symptomatic, the threat is real.
A mortality rate of 4% on 63 million would produce 2.5 million dead. I would say health officials across the world are sleeping on the job. While this is not as bad as the virus outbreak back in 1917 where 10 million people died, this is still a huge number of dead from one virus in a short period of time. Again, that is doing a projection of one month. If the outbreak is not abated by then, the number just keeps going up. Take 7.5 billion population, subtract 25% that might have some form of resistance, and you have about 22 million mortalities at 4%, 5.6 million at 1%.
My wife works for the CDC, and with only six infected here so far, they are asking for volunteers to be deployed to work on the outbreak.