Izvestia

Here is why infection by the novel coronavirus is so dangerous

A pathology report translated from Russian about one week ago explained for the first time in our reading why the COVID-19 illness and its progenitor, the novel coronavirus, is being taken so seriously. As yet, the virus has infected what amounts to be an infinitesimally low number of people (126,258 people worldwide as of 4:47AM EDT March 11, 2020), but against the known number of infections, its mortality rate shows at 3.67%, and this appears far higher than that of the normal influenza rates of about 0.1% of cases.