A study discovered a third of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients admitted to National Health Service hospitals and over half on ventilators do not make it.
Calum Semple, a professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool, told the Daily Mail, "Coronavirus is a very serious disease, the crude hospital case fatality rate is of the same magnitude as Ebola."
The study by the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) analyzed 16,749 hospitalizations in England, Scotland, and Wales due to COVID-19 from February 6 to April 18.
A heavy-hitting disease
They found that 33% have died, 49% were discharged, and 17% are still being cared for in the hospital. Only a fifth of patients who were intubated came home alive. Prof. Semple downplayed the common misconception of COVID being "a bad dose of the flu." He added, "the crude case fatality rate is sitting somewhere between 35 to 40 per cent."
Fifty-three percent of the patients who were connected to a ventilator expired, while 27% of them are still using them. COVID-19 is like Ebola, "which kills roughly four out of every 10 people it infects," according to the Daily Mail.
Ebola virus disease "targets several types of immune cells that represent the first line of defense against invasion," according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Ebola infects dendritic cells, which are responsible for displaying signals of infection to activate white blood cells and antibodies.
Without the first line of defense, Ebola will infect the body, the virus replicating at a rapid pace. It also has something in common with COVID-19: incubation period.
Eerily similar
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "When people become infected with Ebola, they do not start developing signs or symptoms right away. This period between exposure to an illness and having symptoms is known as the incubation period."
For COVID-19, the incubation period is 14 days.
Like the current pandemic, Ebola may also come from bats - their origin still unknown up to this day since its discovery in 1976. CDC said, "However, based on the nature of similar viruses, they believe the virus is animal-borne. Infected animals carrying the virus can transmit it to other animals, like apes, monkeys, duikers and humans."
Prof. Semple sympathizes with the United Kingdom (UK) going on lockdown because he knows how devastating COVID-19 is. " It doesn't surprise me at all it's a really nasty disease," he said.
COVID-19 affects people of all ages, but the elderly seem to be the usual victim. According to ISARIC, the median age of COVID-19 victims is 80. But the youth are not exempted from the disease.
The study revealed, "one in 100 coronavirus sufferers needing hospital care are under the age of five, and one in 50 are 18 or younger," according to the Daily Mail. 60% of all patients are men, which didn't account for those who went under self-quarantine or isolation.
The most common conditions patients with COVID-19 have are heart disease (29%), diabetes (19%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (19%), and asthma (14%).
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