Coronavirus has killed more people in China than SARS. How else do they compare?

As coronavirus continues to spread, infecting people in at least 23 countries, the number of deaths in China caused by the infection has surpassed the casualties of the 2002-03 SARS outbreak.

Chinese authorities say that 361 people have died from coronavirus in mainland China, according to The Guardian. The number of cases diagnosed worldwide has passed 17,200.

SARS — another strand of coronavirus — spread for nine months between 2002 and 2003, infected 5,327 people in China and killed 349, CNN reported. Worldwide, there were 8,098 SARS cases diagnosed.

Other models show that the real number of those infected could be 100,000 or more, according to The New York Times. Coronavirus has been spreading faster than SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which originated in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and spread to other countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say that coronavirus doesn’t appear to be as lethal as SARS, The New York Times reported. The mortality rate of SARS was 9.5 percent and with coronavirus, 2 percent of people infected have died.

SARS originated in Asia and spread to more than 24 countries in North America, Europe, South America and Asia, according to the CDC. There haven’t been any confirmed cases of SARS since 2004.

The World Health Organization officially declared coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern” on Jan. 30.

The U.S. has 11 confirmed cases, with 167 who tested negative and 82 who are pending results, according to the CDC.

World experts also agree that coronavirus likely will become a pandemic, which is an epidemic that spans across two or more continents, according to The New York Times.

“It’s very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told The New York Times.

This story was originally published February 3, 2020 at 1:40 PM with the headline "Coronavirus has killed more people in China than SARS. How else do they compare?."