FT data journalists John Burn-Murdoch and Federica Cocco look at what four key charts tell us about the spread of coronavirus. See if you get the FT for free as a student ( or start a £1 trial:
So coronavirus is a massive story should we be panicking let’s look at the data today we’re going to talk through four charts showing how coronavirus compares two different diseases on all sorts of measures and yet how dangerous is it for you let’s have a look first at the number of cases that we’ve seen starting from day one of the epidemic or when china
First reported it to the world health organization and let’s compare it to the last famous epidemic sars the number of sars cases stayed kind of low and then stabilized at around 10,000 so after about 176 days just under 10,000 and and again like you said everyone was panicked about sort and rightly so cause i had very high fatality rate it did and then
Let’s look at how coronavirus koh bid 19 compares to that so again we start from the first recognized case yeah so i can see from this there is cause for concern yeah you know that’s well over 60,000 after you know 60 70 days compared to under 10,000 after 176 yeah i counter to this that still the number of deaths is very low especially compared to sars
Were looking at a mortality rate of around 2% it’s more in a range but it’s still at around 1,500 around that so it’s very very low okay so you’re saying yes this the cases line may look scary but yeah line is not so it’s not anything to be too worried yeah i mean by comparison for example it’s estimated that around 60,000 people die from seasonal flu in
The us alone every year so so far looks like it remained fairly contained here we have the hebei province it’s the epicenter is where the epidemic first started it spread around china but as we get further and further from hebei then we see fewer cases and i guess that’s because the chinese government immediately enforced a lot of quarantine and that kind
Of thing and there was a lot of travel restrictions now there have been obviously some cases in other countries but as we can see here on one of our own graphics the vast majority have remained in china and again you see the the localization factor china is more connected to its immediate partners so there are a few more cases in places like japan and rest
Of asia than there are in the rest of the world however you know people as you’ve looked at have died outside of china we’ve just had three deaths outside outside of china if we compare that for example to the spanish flu when we were seeing just a fraction of the global mobility that we have today then during that period in 1918 we saw more deaths than in
World war one and world war two combined so i think that those numbers really put it into context of course that was before vaccines yes i guess the other thing that was you know you had millions of people moving around the world because of the war and that was yes spread whereas today they’ve been able to really lock down yes in this case it’s interesting
It’s spread more doing business conferences and so possibly as a result we saw that middle-aged men seemed to be more vulnerable to this particular virus which is interesting but let’s look at the deaths outside of china okay so three weeks after the epidemic started we had just four cases reported outside of china now we’re mid feb we’re looking at just
Under a thousand and they have been all over countries in the space of how long has it been in just a couple of months and again we’re looking at just at the cases outside of china now yeah yeah forgetting china for a second within this space now we’re in mid-february we have only seen so for three deaths we’re gonna pin them in yellow ones and on hongkong
One was in japan an eight year old woman and one was in the philippines the fatality rate is still very low and really the numbers say that it’s not as concerning and aspetto as other epidemics including the seasonal flu that we see every year it’s how infectious is that i think is really what we should still be focusing on here should we have a look at that
Let’s compare seasonal food to coronavirus in terms of the infection rate exactly and that starts with two hypothetical family of five this is my family with seasonal flu and here’s my family with the current kovat 19 strain of corona virus so how many people do they infect now we’re seeing what happens in those first few days as the as these people go out
They mingle they mix and that infection gets spread and as you can see it’s spreading markedly faster for the people who’ve got corona virus than it is for people who see is not flu as we go through to a second cycle you see this even more so seasonal flu is essentially about the same number of people again have been infected whereas in corona virus instead
Of having just another 12 infected it’s another another 34 so it spreads far more rapidly even though those two numbers 2.6 and 1.3 that we started with were not too distant and this is what it’s known as they are value how many people are infected by another person if it’s below one then it’s not contagious at all well i can see here is at the speed of
Contagion for corona virus does in fact look pretty terrifying but how does it compare with a fatality rate that is the question and how does it compare with many other viruses as well the last thing you look at that okay so what we were looking at there was the difference along this horizontal axis in infection rate our value how contagious something is
Exactly that’s that’s the number we have on the horizontal axis here is of how infectious different diseases are you can see measles is pretty infectious yep relatively infectious the current strain of coronaviruses down here at about 2.6 common cold seasonal flu less infectious but the other really important thing as you’ve mentioned to take into account
Here is the mortality rate once you’ve got this virus what are your chances of surviving what are your chances of dying too very famous epidemics bird flu and ebola basically if we were in a pandemic we’d be in the region of year what we’re saying is as you move further in this direction a disease is more infectious and as you move further it’s more deadly
More deadly with coronavirus there is still some uncertainty we are in the early days so let’s say it’s more or less in this shade but it’s the range it’s a range and one of the reasons for that uncertainty there’s you know because of how china has been reporting the cases yes in initially to try and sort of contain maybe the even the panic for the disease
They were under reporting and then there was a lot of suspicion about to the figures that they were reporting because china does traditionally sort of fudge some of the figures it’s done so when it comes to economic growth when it comes to poverty and and we talked about the the range here that the key axis here for that range actually was the vertical
One the mortality rate and that’s because if you think about it a mortality rate is the number of people who have a disease and a virus who go on to die and if either of those numbers the number of deaths or the number of cases is skewed is wrong it’s going to skew the results so what was happening in china was because the chinese were underreporting the
Number of people with the infection at all it actually made the mortality rates look a lot higher so it’s a lot more dangerous in fact which is kind of counterproductive exactly as soon as it spread outside of china we saw that as we saw earlier there were only three deaths the mortality rate was looking more like around two percent exactly so for a while
The the epidemiologist looking into this they they had numbers showing that in parts of wuhan and who bay province and the mortality rate was as high as 10 or even 18 percent whereas as you say once we were able to look at cases outside of china where the data was more reliable it was about 2 percent and that’s because as soon as people moved out of china
Like a british resident coming back to the uk having been to a conference where they were reported cases or coronavirus they get people like that would get examined as soon as possible we saw a case for example of a super spider that ended up in front page of loads of newspapers in this country who had no symptoms and that’s why he infected 11 people he
Didn’t know that he should have been in quarantine this is also one of the reasons that people are a bit more worried about the spread of corona virus than sars because in the case of sars if you weren’t symptomatic you couldn’t actually infect anyone else the mortality rate for this is pretty low but it’s the fact that it can spread easily and without
People even knowing they’re ill that is why maybe people are panicking and i think i’ll be following this story closely not because i’m in now in the panic zone i’m firmly still in the no panic zone but i think it’s leading to a lot of interesting shifts in the relationship between chinese society and government that might you know turn into a different
Story altogether where we’re seeing a sort of break and trust between the chinese government and chinese society so for me i’ll be following this closely but maybe for slightly different reasons so far it’s very se
Transcribed from video
Coronavirus: should we panic? | Crunched By Financial Times
