• Question: is coronavirus the most deadliest disease/cancer.

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      Asked by anon-287539 on 8 Mar 2021.
      • Photo: Jesko Koehnke

        Jesko Koehnke answered on 8 Mar 2021:

        Coronavirus is, as the name suggests, a virus and has nothing to do with cancer as far as we know. There are some viruses that can cause cancer, but probably not this one.
        And no, thankfully coronavirus is comparably benign. That is probably the reason it spread around the globe. The ebola virus kills about half of all that get infected. If as many people got Ebola as got Corona in the UK, that would have meant 2 million deaths in the UK and over 50 million deaths world wide. Glad it is not THAT bad!

      • Photo: Andrew Parrott

        Andrew Parrott answered on 9 Mar 2021:

        Really not my field so others may want to correct me – but my understanding is as the name suggests Coronavirus is a virus (a very small organism, far too small to see with the eye). Coronavirus is not actually that deadly (compared to something like Ebola), problem is that it is very infectious and very few people already have any resistance to it. This means it has spread very quickly and a very high number of people (about 4 million in UK, and over 100 million worldwide) have got Coronavirus. So the small fraction of cases that causes problems is still a high number of people. Sadly this means many people in the UK and around the world have been very ill, and some of those have been killed by it.

      • Photo: Nick Penfold

        Nick Penfold answered on 9 Mar 2021:

        What a great question! To answer, it is best to think about deadliest in terms of a single person or a population and the answer is different.

        For a single person, the risk of coronavirus compared to other diseases can be quite low. However, if we think of the whole world population, unfortunately a lot of people have died so it can be thought of as deadly.

        Either way, it is so important that we follow social distancing measures & practice good hygiene!

      • Photo: Martin McCoustra

        Martin McCoustra answered on 9 Mar 2021:

        No… there are many worse viruses. Some even that we can’t cure as there are no vaccinations.

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