Last week was a notable milestone in the spread of the coronavirus with the number of confirmed cases in China outstripping the SARS epidemic of 2002 and 2003. The World Health Organization recorded 5,327 cases of SARS in China during that outbreak and the number of coronavirus cases is now almost four times as high. As of 3am EST on February 4th, 2020, the Johns Hopkins University tracker showed just over 20,000 cases of the current illness across mainland China. If that was not dire enough, another milestone has been passed with deaths from the coronavirus in China exceeding deaths from SARS.
The World Health Organization says that the first cases of SARS are known to have developed in Guandong Province in China in mid-November of 2002. By the time the epidemic came to an end, 349 deaths were recorded across China, a case-fatality ratio of 11 percent. Since the start of the coronavirus epidemic, 425 deaths have been attributed to it, along with one each on Hong Kong and the Philippines. On Monday alone, Chinese state media reported 57 new deaths, all but one of which were in Wuhan which is the epicenter of the outbreak.
