• Question: what are the chances of people dying from coronavirus?

    Asked by anon-249961 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ben Cropper

      Ben Cropper answered on 10 Mar 2020: last edited 10 Mar 2020 1:38 pm

      It’s not easy to say, because we can only say death rate = number of people who died รท number of people that have it. We don’t know the second number accurately – there’s a bias towards people with worse cases being more likely to present to doctors. As well as this, there’s a weird effect where the exponential infection rate can mask a high death rate. Also, it might affect different groups of people differently. There may be more effects that I don’t know about! An expert might be able to give you some better numbers but I am not one of those, so I won’t try and answer this with any numbers.

      https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/

      Go to this site for advice on coronavirus.

    • Photo: Tom Dally

      Tom Dally answered on 10 Mar 2020: last edited 10 Mar 2020 2:38 pm

      As Ben says, we just don’t have enough accurate information on how many cases there have actually been or how badly the virus affects certain groups to know for certain. The estimated numbers will change as more research gets done and we find out more about the virus itself. Also, I am definitely not an medical expert – I just like insects.
      And yes, see this site for information on coronavirus: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/

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