GUANGZHOU: The coronavirus outbreak is hitting a peak in China this month and may be over by April, the government’s senior medical adviser said on Tuesday, in the latest assessment of an epidemic that has rattled the world.
The peak should come in middle or late February, followed by a plateau and decrease, Zhong said, basing the forecast on mathematical modelling, recent events and government action. “We don’t know why it’s so contagious, so that’s a big problem,” added Zhong, who helped identify flaws in China’s emergency response systems during the 2002-03 SARS crisis.
The virus is believed to have originated in early December in a Wuhan seafood market where wildlife was illegally sold.Local authorities have also come under fire for their heavy-handed treatment of the late doctor Li, who was reprimanded by police in early January for “spreading rumours” about the disease before becoming its best-known fatality last Friday.
The virus has now infected more than 40,000 people on the Chinese mainland and spread to at least 24 countries. “If we have better cooperation and coordination, we can find it earlier and figure out the human-to-human transmission earlier,” he said during the roughly 90-minute interview, adding that the outbreak would not be quite so serious if such a system was in place.
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