NEW YORK: One of the most common questions asked of health experts about the new coronavirus is some variation of the same thing: How worried should I be?
It’s a complicated question for two reasons.
First, while global knowledge of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is growing every day, much remains unknown. Many cases are thought to be mild or asymptomatic, for example, making it hard to gauge how wide the virus has spread or how deadly it is.
Second, much of the risk comes not from the virus itself but from how it affects the societies it hits.
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For most people, the disease is probably not particularly deadly; health officials tend to put it somewhere within range of an unusually severe seasonal flu. Even in a global pandemic, it’s expected to kill fewer people than the flu virus. Data so far suggests that if you catch the coronavirus, you may be likelier to have no symptoms at all than to require hospitalization.
The coronavirus is thought to be much more dangerous for people over age 70 or with existing health conditions such as diabetes. This is also true of the flu.
But because the coronavirus spreads widely and quickly, it can overwhelm local health systems in a way that the flu does not.
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This is thought to have driven the unusually high mortality rate in Hubei, the region of China where the coronavirus first spread. Officials, unprepared for the outbreak, were caught without sufficient hospital beds or health care workers, meaning that many people who might have survived with better care did not. In South Korea, where officials were better prepared, the mortality rate has been a fraction of that in Hubei — so far, about that of the flu.
