Quote Originally Posted by Lullapie View Post
Is the mortality rate that much different - only asking the question before the Usual Suspects pipe up? I mean if Covid-19 had a high mortality rate, but very low transmission, would we be closing everything down?
MERS is around 35% fatality rate, hard to catch unless you're living or caring for a carrier
SARS was 11%, harder to spread but you can get it out in public
COVID, hard to say right now but we're probably looking at 1% globally. I think half of the world is expected to get it at some point, so 1% of those would be an enormous number of people.

If we had something like MERS in the UK instead of COVID then we wouldn't need to shut down, the advice would be to avoid whichever animal was passing it on.

Another SARS-1 level of mortality and spread probably would result in a shutdown now that we've had COVID, but it would be much easier to bring under control so restrictions might be more localised and wouldn't take as long.