From the information known at this point, several facts are pertinent. First, it belongs to the same family of coronaviruses that caused the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2012. Second, the mortality rate (number of deaths relative to number of cases), which is as yet imprecisely estimated, is probably in the range of 1%-3.4%-significantly lower than 10% for SARS and 34% for MERS (Table 1, first column), but substantially higher than the mortality rate for seasonal flu, which is less than 0.1%. 2 Third, even though it emerged from animal hosts, it now spreads through human-to-human contact. The infection rate of COVID-19 appears to be higher than that for the seasonal flu and MERS, with the range of possible estimates encompassing the infection rates of SARS and Ebola (Table 1, second column).