Insanely high numbers of confirmed cases, deaths and isolation have been flooding the news since the Wuhan virus outbreak.
What we barely get to see is the silver lining to all this, that hundreds have successfully recovered.
As of yesterday (3 Feb), over 600 patients in China tested negative for the virus, giving us hope that fighting it wouldn’t be an impossible battle.
After Hubei authorities reported 64 new deaths today (4 Feb), tension over the health crisis seems to keep mounting.
Channel NewsAsia (CNA) pinned the total death count in China at 425, making the global total 427, following two external fatalities in the Philippines on Saturday (1 Feb) and Hong Kong today.
The total number of cases in China alone is at 20,438, a large jump from the 17,205 yesterday (3 Feb). That means over 3,000 new cases cropped up in just a day.
Visit any news site and you can easily see these numbers in tables or graphs showing the figures that would scare you.
What they fail to show is the flip side to all this, which is the statistics for recovery.
According to The Straits Times (ST), a total of 632 patients have walked out of Chinese hospitals free of the Wuhan virus by the end of yesterday (3 Feb).
Reference site Worldometer meanwhile, which posts timely updates of the outbreak, places the number at 642.
Whichever source may be true, the numbers show that the virus may not be as deadly as we make it to be.
Experts have drawn links between the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV and the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) purely because they’re different strains of the same virus.
Unlike SARS, however, the 2019-nCoV may be less deadly, “although it appears to spread much faster”, reports Reuters.
Out of the roughly 8,000 infected, SARS killed almost 800, putting the mortality rate at about 10%.
By calculation, the current mortality rate for the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan virus is 2%, which is consistent with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) early estimate on 29 Jan.
The elation on the faces of hundreds who have walked out of hospitals free of the virus is truly uplifting.
With medical staff working tirelessly to treat patients and researchers coming up with groundbreaking potential cures, there’s hope yet that the outbreak will blow over soon.
Till then, let’s do our best to observe all the health and safety measures, for the greater good.
Featured image adapted from China Xinhua News on Twitter.
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