Coronavirus: Facts We Need to Know and What We Can Do

Our country faces a highly complex situation in relation to coronavirus, and in this piece I will try, as directly as possible, to explain it. Only an hour ago, the World Health Organization, reporting Iran’s figures, stated that 95 confirmed cases of coronavirus had been identified in Iran and 15 deaths from infection had been reported. According to the official statistics, only three people had fully recovered, while Iran was the only country that had not yet reported any severe cases.

A glance at two countries with numbers of officially diagnosed cases close to Iran—Singapore (90 cases) and Hong Kong (81)—shows a clear difference. Together, these two have thirteen people in serious or critical condition, while only two deaths had been confirmed in Hong Kong.

Statistical examination of infections and mortality up to this moment shows that the highest percentage of deaths from the disease had been in China: 2,664 deaths among 77,663 infections, with 27,627 people fully recovered and 9,126 in serious condition. This amounts to a mortality rate of around 3.4%, around 12% severe disease, and 36% full recovery.

But these figures are from China, which encountered the virus for the first time without prior preparation, in Wuhan, described here as a kind of transport capital of China because it connects Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong and because many national and international manufacturers use the city’s transport network.

When we look at deaths from the virus outside China, we encounter different figures. Of 2,594 diagnosed cases outside mainland China, excluding those diagnosed in Iran, a total of 29 deaths had been reported—only 1.1% mortality—while 82 cases, or 3.4% of patients, were in serious or critical condition.

Thus, outside Iran, even under the worst conditions—that is, in mainland China—we were seeing 3.4% mortality and 12% severe disease, while outside China the reported figures were 1.1% mortality and 3.4% severe disease. Yet in Iran, of 95 diagnosed cases, 15 deaths had been confirmed, giving a reported mortality of 15.7%, while no figures on severe cases were available.

Even if this mortality percentage had been reported accurately, it would have been around fourteen times higher than the global average outside China and about 4.5 times the mortality rate from the beginning of the outbreak to that date in China itself, the original centre of the epidemic.