Posted
March 22, 2020 06: 03: 45
Coronavirus isn’t the first pandemic to sweep the globe in recent years. Epidemics like bird flu, Ebola, SARS and swine flu are still fresh in our memories.
So how does COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, compare? And what sets it apart from the flu seasons we face each winter?
Here’s how Dr Norman Swan, host of the ABC’s Coronacast, explains it:
“COVID-19 has two or three times the transmission rate [compared with the flu] … and the case fatality rate for COVID-19 is around 30 times higher than the flu.”
How contagious is coronavirus?
Diseases further to the right in this chart have a higher reproduction rate, which is the average number of people an infected person will spread the illness to.
As we can see in the chart, coronavirus spreads more easily than seasonal flu. The reproduction rate (also called “R0” or “R naught”) is somewhere between 2 and 2.6. It’s shown as a range because it varies between places and is influenced by the measures taken to slow transmission.
By contrast, each person who gets seasonal flu will pass it on to just over one other person on average, meaning it sp