What is the mortality rate for cholera?
Cholera has a short incubation period, 2-3 days, and can be rapidly fatal if untreated. The death rate may be as high as 50%, and some epidemics ahve had a 90% mortality rate. But with effective treatment, mortality is less than 1%. For comparison, the 1849 St. Louis epidemic resulted in 4,557 deaths in a population of 63,000. That’s just 7.2% of the total population, many years before effective treatment was devised; but that figure may be misleading, as we do not know how many people actually contracted the disease.
