A new study reports that people who became sick from the coronavirus in the Chinese city where the outbreak began likely had a lower death rate than previously thought.

Under control: a cleaner wears a mask as she works at a private maternity hospital in Wuhan, Hubei. Credit:Getty

The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Medicine, calculated that people with coronavirus symptoms in Wuhan, China, had a 1.4 per cent likelihood of dying.

Some previous estimates have ranged from 2 per cent to 3.4 per cent.

Assessing the risk of death in Wuhan is instructive because it provides a snapshot of the epidemic from the beginning, when doctors were scrambling to treat people with the brand-new virus and hospitals were overwhelmed.