COVID-19 is a very similar disease to influenza. This novel coronavirus seems to cause similar symptoms and to progress in a similar way. As a respiratory disease, COVID-19 is likely transmitted like influenza, via contact with respiratory droplets.
The majority of the data we have on this virus and disease is still that from China, and it’s difficult to know or to understand how reliable that data is and how representative it is of what may occur in other parts of the world, such as in the United States.
People in the scientific community are wary of the data coming out of China.
It’s likely that there many more cases of COVID-19 that have not been reported. Many people have probably been slightly ill with a much milder disease, for which no medical assistance was needed and no diagnostic testing was performed. That means that most people infected with the virus recovered without ever being diagnosed with COVID-19.
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 are slowly occurring in the United States, and they seem to be widely distributed, albeit they still represent a fairly low number on the scale of an epidemic.
From the information that we have at this point, in some ways, COVID-19 has behaved like the flu, though perhaps it’s a bit more contagious in the right conditions.
The caveat is that this assumption is based mostly on information from cases seen in the Chinese population. From that data, it appears that for most people, COVID-19 is a mild disease, probably flu-like, but maybe even milder and more like a cold.
There are other coronaviruses that regularly infect people and cause a common cold, and for the most part, people never bother to seek medical attention for these more common coronaviruses because they do not make people as ill as the flu.