A terrifying new statement made by Hong Kong’s top epidemiologist indicates that the lethal and fast-spreading coronavirus currently ravaging China could infect up to 60% of the global population if it continues to go unchecked. As the Guardian reports:
The coronavirus epidemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s population if it cannot be controlled, according to Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologist.
His warning came after the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said recent cases of coronavirus patients who had never visited China could be the “tip of the iceberg”.
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.
Under such a situation, the death toll would, more likely than not, be potentially massive and devastating.
Image Credit: Daniel Mayer / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
