15 Coronavirus Myths Explored

4. COVID-19 is just like the flu

SARS-CoV-19 causes an illness that has similar symptoms with the flu, like aches, fever, and coughing. Both COVID-19 and flu can go from mild to severe, or even fatal in some cases. Both can lead to pneumonia.

Nevertheless, the overall profile of COVID-19 is more severe. Even though the estimates vary, the mortality rate seems to be somewhere between 1% and 3%.

Scientists are trying to discover the exact mortality rate, it is, unfortunately, likely to be many times higher than that of seasonal flu.

5. Everyone with COVID-19 dies

This obviously is false. COVID-19 can be, indeed, fatal in some cases, but only for a small percentage of people, who already have other preexisting conditions.

A recent report made by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 80.9% of COVID-19 cases are mild.

6. Cats and dogs spread coronavirus

Currently, there is not enough evidence to show how SARS-CoV-2 can infect cats and dogs. However, there has been one case in Hong Kong, where a Pomeranian became infected with the COVID-19 because his owner was infected as well. Regardless, the dog didn’t have any symptoms.

Scientists are trying to discover the importance of this case to the epidemic. Prof. Jonathan Ball, Professor of Molecular Virology at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, says:

“We have to differentiate between real infection and just detecting the presence of the virus. I still think it’s questionable how relevant it is to the human outbreak, as most of the global outbreak has been driven by human-to-human transmission.”

He continues: “We need to find out more, but we don’t need to panic — I doubt it could spread to another dog or a human because of the low levels of the virus. The real driver of the outbreak is humans.”