A view from a loftier perch — a month’s, or even just a week’s, perspective — would, and will, produce far more reliable information.

As of Tuesday, the case fatality rate of COVID-19 appeared to be about 2.5 percent. That’s in keeping with what it was, for example, from the beginning of the outbreak up to Jan. 28. By comparison, the case fatality rate for the seasonal flu in the United States ranges between 0.10 percent and 0.18 percent. For SARS, it’s about 10 percent and for MERS, about 35 percent. For Ebola, it has varied between 25 percent and 90 percent, depending on outbreaks, averaging approximately 50 percent.

And so based on what we know so far, COVID-19 seems to be much less fatal than other coronavirus infections and diseases that turned into major epidemics in recent decades. The operative words here are “based on what we know so far” — meaning, both no more and no less than that, and also that our take on the situation might need to change as more data come in.