“COVID-19 seems to have the best, or the worst, of both worlds. Because it spreads very efficiently, it doesn’t kill as many people; but the percentage it kills is far higher than the common flu,” said Associate Professor Hsu Li Yang, Programme Leader (Infectious Diseases).
He was comparing COVID-19 to influenza for Mothership’s ‘Experts Explain’ series.
Assoc Prof Hsu clarified that there are two types of coronaviruses, human coronaviruses, which cause the common flu, and animal coronaviruses, which “rarely jump over to (infect) humans”.
On COVID-19 being the ‘new normal’, he mentioned that the virus could spread globally and subsequently “be part of the group of respiratory viruses that infect us along with influenza”.
Watch the video here: