BBC’s _More or Less_ did a bit on this. 70% more deadly (per person) would actually be better than 70% more infectious. Deaths increase linearly with deadliness

BBC’s _More or Less_ did a bit on this. 70% more deadly (per person) would actually be better than 70% more infectious. Deaths increase linearly with deadliness of virus, but they increase exponentially with infectiousness. Say the current mortality rate is 2% and each infected person passes on the disease to one other after a week, then stops being infectious. If 100 people have the virus in week 0, after 10 weeks 1000 people will have had the virus and 20 will have died. Increase the death rate by 70% and you’d have 34 deaths instead. Increase the transmission rate by 70%, and you’d have 170 people newly infected in week 1, then 289 in week 2, totalling 285,000 infected people, of which 2% die. That’s now 570 deaths. Obviously the numbers can all be changed somewhat depending on treatment, or whether you expect everyone to be infected at some point anyway, but the takeaway is that more deadly is not necessarily worse than more infectious.