How the coronavirus compares to SARS, swine flu, Zika, and other epidemics
But to some, the coronavirus outbreak is reminiscent of epidemics that have caused a panic in recent memory, including SARS, MERS, the Zika virus, and swine flu.For one, we know that the coronavirus outbreak is not as deadly as the SARS epidemic of 2003, which killed around 10% of the 8,098 confirmed cases of the respiratory illness.
However, both of those illnesses were far more contained than COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. There have been more than 113,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and it has a mortality rate of 3.4%, according to the latest data. The coronavirus outbreak is more severe than the 2009 outbreak of H1N1, or swine flu. That illness infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people worldwide but only had a mortality rate of 0.02%.
But it's important to note that Zika is transmitted primarily through mosquitoes, while the coronavirus is spread through respiratory fluids such as saliva or mucus.
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