What we know about coronavirus recovery rates

Since the beginning of the year, more than 785,000 people around the world have been diagnosed with coronavirus.

And of those, more than 37,000 have died from the illness.

But there's another figure that health authorities are also keeping a close eye on – the number of people who have got better.

Globally less than a quarter of the people who have caught it have officially recovered.

Of those, nearly half are in China, with 92 per cent of reported cases there now in recovery.

This is to be expected. As the original epicentre of the disease, China reported its biggest spike in cases in early February.

After weeks and weeks of strict lockdown measures and widespread testing, so many have recovered there simply because of the passage of time.

Not so in Australia, where half of coronavirus cases have been diagnosed in the past week.

Even in the mildest cases of the disease, it takes at least 14 days to fully recover from the virus.

As a consequence, the large number of coronavirus patients in Australia haven't recovered because they haven't had it long enough.

Recovery numbers

While the diagnosis data has been regularly reported by health authorities to the media, recovery figures have not.

Victoria currently leads the charge in that regard, reporting that 191 of their 821 coronavirus patients have recovered.

In New South Wales, 2032 people have been diagnosed, but officially, only four have recovered.

This is not an indication of NSW being drastically more sickly than Victoria, but simply a problem of collating the data.

"It's not an exact science," a NSW Health spokesperson told 9News.

"It's not the easiest thing to get together."

And with pathologists working around the clock on diagnosing potentially serious cases, giving patients with mild symptoms the all-clear is not the top priority.

Why recovery rates are so important

Obviously it is important for a person to get better from a disease, but a recovery from coronavirus is important from public health perspective.

A recovered person frees up a hospital bed and life-saving equipment like ventilators.

It eases the burden on the health system, which is forecast to come under heavy strain in coming weeks.

And for even the most asymptomatic cases, a recovery is invaluable.

The blood of a recovered COVID-19 patient is full of antibodies that could save the life of the very sick.

In coming months hospitals may be looking for blood donations from the recovered to aid the sick.

A recovered coronavirus patient could also return back to a normal life. Germany is considering issuing "immunity passports" for people who have got better from coronavirus.

Such a passport would free them from some of the self-isolation measures most of us are under.

And in the absence of a vaccine, a substantial number of recovered patients would create "herd immunity".

Herd immunity means that if enough people have already had the virus, it will not effectively spread through the population.

The fatality rate

At present count, the worldwide fatality rate for coronavirus is 4.8 per cent.

But this count is skewed by some countries with a much higher fatality rate.

In Iran, the fatality rate is 6.6 per cent. In Spain it is closer to nine per cent, and in Italy it is over 10 per cent.

This could be for several reasons. One is that testing is so selective in Italy and Spain that only the worst cases are being correctly diagnosed.

Those with mild or no symptoms are not being tested, and as a result, do not factor into the survival rate.

More grimly, the health systems there are being forced to triage the patients unlikely to survive.

In some Italian hospitals, patients older than 60 are denied scarce resources like ventilators so the young have a better chance of survival.

In Australia, just 0.4 per cent of coronavirus patients have died from the disease. In the US, it is 1.8 per cent.

But it is too early to draw too many conclusions from that low number. More than half of Australian coronavirus patients have been diagnosed in the past week.