An image of the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus. CDC image via Wikipedia.
The Coronavirus outbreak is obviously terrible. Almost a million people are infected and thousands of people are dead. So it seems strange to be thankful about much of anything. But I do think that the world lucked out about a lot of aspects of this virus. Here's a list.
1. The mortality rate is relatively low. Though a high mortality rate ironically would be better as viruses that kill quickly generally have trouble spreading, it's not as high as it could be. Most estimates are that the Coronavirus kills between 2-4%, with some estimates being much lower. We could easily have a virus that kills 5 to 10%.
2. The virus mostly targets the elderly. Though this is still obviously a tragedy but thankfully it mostly kills the old and the already sick. Children are, for whatever reason, mostly immune to the worst effects of this virus. And people in the prime of their life, the 20's, 30's and 40's are a lot more resistant to it than the old.
This is a bigger deal than people realize. If the virus was killing everyone equally we might have seen a collapse of services, which would quickly spiral out of control. If a younger person is sick they usually pull through and then can return to work in a week or two if they are in a critical industry. If that wasn't the case we would have a lot more people dying, and not only from the virus. Food, medicine and basically logistics in general would be a nightmare. We might even see widespread civil disorder.
3. The virus hit the developed world first. So far the virus has mostly hit East Asia, Europe and the United States. These are the regions of the world most able to deal with the virus. Hitting these regions first spurred the development of treatments and production of supplies that will help the world when the virus inevitably hit the rest of the world.
If the virus had hit Africa or India first, we'd be looking at millions of dead and the virus probably would have spread a lot faster than it did. China has a lot of problems and they did not handle the first months of the outbreak well, but they were able to buy us some time with the Wuhan lockdown that I can't see a third world country doing.
4. Treatments seem to be available. I don't want to overstate the effectiveness of Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine but these drugs do seem to help quite a bit and will probably save a lot of lives. They aren't a cure but they are helping. Furthermore, Remdesivir, a failed Ebola drug seems to be working as well. It was very possible that we wouldn't even have these drugs that are still unproven.
5. Our medical technology is fairly advanced. For all the hand wringing about ventilators, imagine how bad this would be if we didn't even have them. Though most people who are ventilators do not pull through, we are saving lives with this technology. And that's just one example, medicine has advanced quite a bit and if we hadn't we would have had a lot more deaths than we are going to get.
6. Our leadership is mostly taking this seriously. Though all the world leaders deserve some criticism for their response, the vast majority are trying to save as many people as they can. A couple are not, but if they were the majority instead of the minority this virus would have been a lot more widespread than it already is.
7. We didn't have anything major going on in the world during the outbreak. Had this virus happened a few years back when ISIS was running rampant, Ukraine was blowing up and Ebola was raging in West Africa, we would have been a lot more trouble. And the economic damage was reduced by the fact that the global economy was in the middle of a boom.
As far as I am concerned we dodged a bullet here. This outbreak could have been much worse and we could have had millions of dead already. Our governments will survive this and so will the vast majority of people. For that I am thankful.
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