So says Ira Longini, an adviser to the World Health Organisation who tracked studies of the virus’s transmissibility in China. His estimate implies that there could eventually be billions more infections than the current official tally of about 60,000.
Quarantines may slow the spread, but the virus had the opportunity to roam in China and beyond before they went into effect, Longini said. The country boosted its count of those infected by almost 15,000 on Thursday after widening the diagnosis methods. “Unless the transmissibility changes, surveillance and containment can only work so well,” Longini, co-director of the Centre for Statistics and Quantitative Infectious Diseases at the University of Florida, said in an interview at WHO headquarters in Geneva.He’s not alone in warning of the possibility of a far greater spread. Neil Ferguson, a researcher at Imperial College London, estimated that as many as 50,000 people may be infected each day in China.
“People change behaviours” in response to disease, he said. “This is kind of a worst-case scenario. It’s one of the possibilities.”
Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)
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