While the Wuhan coronavirus death rate is still considerably lower than that of SARS - an earlier major outbreak of a coronavirus - the total number of deaths caused by the current pandemic has now exceed that of the 2002-2003 disease. Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the Wuhan outbreak, has so far recorded 910 deaths worldwide from a total 40,561 confirmed cases.
Although the rate of death is less alarming than it was with SARS, the speed at which the 2020 coronavirus has infected large numbers of people is a different story. It took six months for the number of SARS cases to exceed 5,000 in mainland China, whereas the coronavirus surpassed that in just one.
