Coronavirus 'Could Affect 60% of Global Population If Unchecked'

According to Hong Kong's leading public health epidemiologist, the coronavirus outbreak could spread to about two-thirds of the world's population if it can not be regulated.

His warning came after the World Health Organization (WHO) head claimed recent cases of patients with coronavirus who had never toured China could be the "iceberg tip."

Prof Gabriel Leung, the chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University, said the overriding question was to figure out the size and shape of the iceberg. Most experts thought that each person infected would go on to transmit the virus to about 2.5 other people. That gave an “attack rate” of 60-80%.

“Sixty percent of the world’s population is an awfully big number,” Leung told the Guardian in London, en route to an expert meeting at the WHO in Geneva on Tuesday.

Even if the overall rate of fatality is as small as 1 per cent, which Leung claims is probable by contemplating milder situations, the death toll would be huge.

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He will tell the WHO meeting that the main issue is the size of the growing global outbreak and the second priority is to figure out whether China's drastic measures to prevent the spread succeeded – because other countries would worry about implementing them if they did.

The Geneva meeting brings together more than 400 researchers and national authorities, including some participating by video conference from mainland China and Taiwan. “With 99% of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world,” the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in his opening remarks. To date China has reported 42,708 confirmed cases, including 1,017 deaths, Tedros said.

Leung – one of the world's coronavirus disease researchers, who played a major role in the 2002-03 Sars outbreak – works closely with other leading scientists, including colleagues at Imperial College London and Oxford University.

Source: The Guardian