The number of infections is accelerating, stock markets are plummeting and airlines are cancelling flights.
Shops have run out of hand sanitiser and increasing numbers of people are wearing face masks — if they can manage to buy one at an affordable price.
But are we panicking too much over Covid-19?
Clearly, the disease is a serious matter, particularly for the elderly and infirm, but here are ten reasons why it might not turn out to be as bad as we fear…
1
In China, where the disease originated, the epidemic seems to be in steep decline.
At the peak of the crisis, four weeks ago, new infections were running at more than 3,000 a day.
However, on Sunday, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), just 46 new cases were confirmed — not far from the 43 cases in Britain.
If the disease follows the same trend here, where the epidemic is running several weeks behind China, the panic could soon be over.
People are pictured above wearing medical masks in London. The number of infections is accelerating, stock markets are plummeting and airlines are cancelling flights
2
Globally, too, the number of new infections flattened at the weekend — with 3,735 new cases reported on Saturday, falling to 3,656 on Sunday, according to the WHO.
This may, of course, turn out to be just a blip — a similarly modest fall was recorded the previous Sunday, so it might simply be down to fewer tests being performed at the weekend. If the fall is sustained, on the other hand, it could be a sign that the epidemic has peaked.
Less good news is that new infections in Italy — the worst-affected European country — leapt from 778 on Saturday to 1,247 on Sunday.
3
We are approaching spring, when most viral infections tend to decline.
According to the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, there ‘may be a seasonal element’ to the coronavirus, just as there is to seasonal flu, which means transmission could well slow down over the coming weeks.
Experiments have shown a dramatic fall in the length of time that a virus is able to survive outside the human body as the temperature rises.
The flu season, for example, tends to be over by April.
Medical staff are pictured above in Wuhan, China after all patients were discharged at a temporary hospital. Globally, too, the number of new infections flattened at the weekend — with 3,735 new cases reported on Saturday, falling to 3,656 on Sunday, according to the WHO
4
We have had frequent scares about novel infectious diseases in recent years, and none of them has developed into a pandemic. Sars, which emerged in 2002, killed 774 people.
In 2005, the WHO predicted that the H5N1 strain of avian flu could kill up to 50 million people worldwide, while Dr Dena Grayson, who helped develop the drugs to treat the deadly Ebola virus, has warned that with Covid-19, we could see a ‘second wave’ of cases ‘similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic’.
In the event, H5N1 has killed 455 people. Covid-19 has already killed more than this — 3,584 up until the end of Sunday — but it is still a long way short of a pandemic.
5
Even if you are in close contact with someone who has — or who is incubating — the disease, there is still a good chance that you won’t catch it.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock last week said the Government was working on a worst-case scenario that up to 80 per cent of the UK population might catch the virus.
However, in Hubei province, China — where the disease originated — only 20 per cent of the population is reported to have caught the disease.
And a study by the Shenzhen Centre for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that only 7.9 per cent of adults who have been in close family contact with someone who has the disease will go on to catch it themselves.
A man is pictured wearing a mask outside Rome’s Colosseum in Italy. We have had frequent scares about novel infectious diseases in recent years, and none of them has developed into a pandemic
6
Kids are even better off. For children under ten, the Chinese study found the infection rate to be slightly less — just 7.4 per cent. This is in spite of children having generally poorer personal hygiene than adults.
Moreover, children were less likely to develop symptoms even if they were infected — suggesting that they have some degree of natural protection from the disease.
This is in contrast to many viruses which have a habit of spreading quicker in schools than in other environments due to children’s less developed immune systems.
7
The number of deaths globally is still tiny compared with the amount of people who annually succumb to seasonal flu.
According to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the annual global death toll from seasonal flu is between 291,000 and 646,000.
Up until Sunday, by contrast, there had been 3,584 deaths worldwide from Covid-19.
We don’t notice this death toll from seasonal flu because many of the victims were already suffering from other medical conditions, and were liable to die at any time.
The same is true of the coronavirus, where Chinese figures suggest that the death rate from Covid-19 rises tenfold in people suffering from cardiovascular diseases.
This means that the majority of healthy people can expect to survive even if they catch the disease.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock last week said the Government was working on a worst-case scenario that up to 80 per cent of the UK population might catch the virus
8
The claim that Covid-19 kills 3.4 per cent of those it infects is almost certainly a huge over-estimate.
The figure came from the WHO last week, but — as the organisation was keen to stress — it had arrived at the number simply by dividing the number of reported deaths by the number of reported cases.
This does not give a true figure for the mortality rate, because many mild cases of the virus, especially in the early stages of the outbreak, will have gone unrecorded.
Zhejiang province, which has a population of 54 million (not much less than that of the UK), last week reported that it had recorded a grand total of 1,215 cases in the past three months with just one fatality.
According to Professor Chris Whitty, the UK death rate is likely to be 1 per cent at most, and probably rather less.
9
As Covid-19 evolves it should become less virulent. The tendency of viruses to become less deadly — at least in the early years of a novel disease — was identified in experiments with the myxoma virus in rabbits in Australia in the Fifties.
The virus was developed with the intention of controlling the rabbit population, and initially it killed almost every rabbit it infected within two weeks.
However, within months the virus had evolved to kill between 50 per cent and 95 per cent of the rabbits it infected. There is a good evolutionary reason for this; it is not in the interests of a pathogen to kill its host animal.
The most successful virus is one which spreads very easily but whose effect on the human body is hardly noticed. However, we will have to be eternally vigilant as the virus could mutate into a more deadly form.
10
The FTSE 100 plunged nearly 8 per cent yesterday and share prices tumbled so fast on the New York Stock Exchange that they triggered a ‘kill switch’ that stops trading for a 15-minute cooling-off period.
However, the good news is that while previous disease scares have caused big falls in stock markets, they haven’t led to recessions (two successive quarters of negative growth).
The Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968-69 killed 1 million people. The Dow Jones index of U.S. shares slumped by 21 per cent at one point. But it didn’t lead to a recession.
In Britain, economic growth in the first quarter of 1969 slipped to minus 0.2 per cent, but it rebounded to 0.8 per cent in the second quarter.
The FTSE 100 plunged nearly 8 per cent yesterday and share prices tumbled so fast on the New York Stock Exchange (above) that they triggered a ‘kill switch’ that stops trading for a 15-minute cooling-off period