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It is (far) too soon to compare the coronavirus to other pandemics
By Kent R. Kroeger (March 26, 2020)
Nobody truly knows when the coronavirus pandemic will end and its final human toll.
That doesn’t stop some of us from trying to predict how this crisis will resolve.
I predicted in late January that the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) — the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease — would peak in China in mid February around 20,000 cases, effectively joining the pantheon of pandemic scares that never materialized in a big way on a global scale (e.g., 1976 Swine Flu, 2002 SARS, 2012-present MERS, etc.).
After that bad call, I’m officially out of the coronavirus prediction business.
I know I don’t know what is ultimately going to happen with COVID-19.
But the real experts don’t know either.
Most of us have visited the Johns Hopkins University (CSSE) website that provides “near real-time” counts of coronavirus COVID-19 cases and deaths worldwide.
Their website has numbers — lots of them — from reliable government sources, nonetheless. Those numbers must be fairly accurate, to the extent possible under such difficult circumstances, right?
