But ordinary flu has only a .1% mortality rate. Because it is widespread, quarantines are not feasible for flu outbreaks.
The 1918 Spanish flu had a 2.5% mortality rate. SARS has a 3.7% mortality rate but appears to be less transmissible than flu.
The part of the story that you might be missing is that SARS requires many days on a ventilator for most patients and that many of the survivors will have lung damage and permanent health problems. Look at the discharge numbers. Not that many people with this thing have left the hospital.
Just imagine if this spreads further. How many ventilator beds do we have in this country? The mortality rate of SARS could increase if our medical infrastructure is overwhelmed by patients and sick doctors and nurses.
Toronto, Hong Kong and Singapore's quarantines are long overdue. I don't think they acted quickly enough. Now that we have been warned, it would pay to not underestimate this virus.
Please, I've been trying to get a handle on numbers on this and have found nothing but confusion.
Are you saying if one excludes those currently afflicted/infected by the disease, that 3.7% of those who caught SARS died and 96.3% recovered (albeit possibly impaired)?
Or are you saying that 3.7% of those diagnosed thus far have died?
There's a big difference between the two. Imagine a disease that takes exactly 10 years to run its course and at the end of the course it is always, 100%, fatal. Let's say it's detected one year after first onset. For 9 years, under the second definition above, it has a 0% "mortality rate"; nobody's died (yet). After 10 years the rate will start to grow, but as long as the disease exists it will never reach a mortality rate of exactly 100%, even though everyone who gets it dies of it (uless they die of something else first).
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I've seen enough of the above confusion. I'd like real answers and it seems you might have them -- I just want to be sure. (Can you provide sources for these figures, btw?)