Dr. Mark Kortepeter, a biodefense physician who has previously worked in the U.S. Army’s “hot zone” study lab, explains calculations of how Covid-19’s death toll outweighs the deadest viruses.
In the pantheon of infectious disease killers, Ebola is one of the deadliest. The Zairean species of Ebola kills between 40% and 90% of its victims, and more than 60% of other inflamed people die. Only a handful of infectious diseases can claim such high mortality rates, adding rabies, pulmonary plague and inhaled anthrax.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 disease reached a dark level in early July. The number of Covid-19 deaths in Africa, more than 11,950, has surpassed the total number of other people who died in the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded in West Africa, according to the World Health Organization.
How can that be? How is it possible that a disease that usually kills more than 60% of its patients is overtaken by Covid-19, which kills “only” 4% of its patients, according to the most recent figures?
The answer is a basic facet of the maximum virus. Actually, they don’t like to kill their guests. They can have a much broader effect if their hosts don’t die. This allows them to move around the network for much longer and spread around the world to have a much greater effect.
When a user gets sick with Ebola, he prostrates himself in bed very quickly. In fact, it’s hard to be online spreading disease if you vomit or have severe diarrhea. Those at the highest risk of Ebola infection are those who have very close contact to attend to in poor health situations and bed-rated victims, either at home or in the hospital. In addition, Ebola only spreads when the victim develops symptoms. This makes it much less difficult to find out who is inflamed by Ebola and who to isolate and quarantine than with Covid-19.
Some other inflamed people would likely spread Covid-19 without symptoms or before they appear. These other people will not be be be bedridden when they are contagious. Instead, they can spend time at a party on the beach or at a bar and spread the virus without even knowing they have become inflamed. The more contagious a human host is and the more social interactions there are in the community, the more opportunities there are for a virus to spread those interactions and the more it spreads.
This is the basis of the measures that the public aptitude government has been advocating since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic: quarantine (restricted flow of others in danger, but not yet sick), isolation (restricted flow of other people in poor physical condition). ), mask (to decrease the threat of spread, because we do not know through someone if they are infected) and social estrangement (to minimize close interactions between other people).
Other countries have understood that. Why america?
However, in the end, a disease like Covid-19 that has a lower mortality rate, on average, in a single patient, can kill more people based on undeniable calculations. More other inflamed people result in more deaths. This is where Covid-19 wins comfortably and explains why the recent outbreak of cases in parts of the United States is so dangerous. The more inflamed and contagious other people are, the more they will die.
Here’s a calculation that explains this:
In the largest Ebola outbreak in West Africa, there were 28,616 cases of Ebola virus disease and 11,310 deaths, with a mortality rate of 39.5% (low-old Ebola mortality rates in Zaire).
If we had only 28,616 cases of COVID-19, at the current mortality rate of 4.1%, this would result in 1,173 deaths. But, when it has about six hundred times more international bodies (more than 17.1 million at the time of writing this article), because the SARS-CoV-2 virus is spreading well and we have not succeeded, even though the mortality rate is “Only” about 4%, which corresponds to the current figure of 669,000 international deaths. As I said before, the epidemiology of infectious diseases is not space science. A ninth grader who is doing fundamental algebra can perform the same calculation. Other countries have understood that. Why not America?
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I’m an infectious disease doctor, scientist, retired army colonel, and Inside the Hot Zone, a suspenseful account of infectious diseases and the epidemic.
I’m an infectious disease doctor, scientist, retired army colonel, and “Inside the Hot Zone,” a suspenseful account of infectious diseases and epidemic crises that I controlled in the U.S. Army Hot Zone lab. En Fort Detrick, Maryland.