Yep, MERS is still around and it has a fatality rate of a whopping 35% - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle-east-respiratory-syndrome-coron...

And yet we hear nothing about it. It's fatality rate is so high that it inhibits its spread, unlike 2019-nCoV, which has a very low fatality rate so spreads well.

But this nCoV is a pussy compared to MERS or SARS, a whimp, a teeny bopper, a wannabe big player. And yet, there's still a chance that it could be really nasty. I'm guessing the actual fatality rate is about the same as the flu, maybe slightly higher. But if it's, say, 3 times that of the flu, or nearing 1%, then it's bad news.

In other words, the super bug, the virus that is going to kill tens of millions, is going to have a low fatality rate relative to MERS and SARS. No doubt virologists have figured this all out. There must be a 'golden' rate for a novel virus to be really devastating -- low enough to maintain hosts, but high enough to do the damage. What is that number? 2%? 5%? It's surely not 30%.

Regarding the rate of nCoV, we just don't know because the data coming out of China is not reliable. They're not reporting all the cases because most people aren't going to hospital. So the question is, how many cases are there, really, and how many people have died from this thing, really. I'm guessing the rate is flu-like.