CDC warns further spread inevitable
27 February, 2020
U.S. health officials warned Tuesday that the burgeoning coronavirus is certain to spread more widely in the united states at some point, even as their counterparts in Europe and Asia scrambled to contain new outbreaks of the condition.
“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but instead more a question of specifically when this may happen - and how many persons in this country will have serious illness,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a call with reporters.
The CDC’s demand Americans to prepare yourself added new urgency to response efforts that, until this week, focused on an illness largely confined to China, where it apparently originated, and neighboring countries.
In other developments Tuesday:
- New clusters of the illness popped up definately not China, triggering increased concerns for officials in some of the wealthiest nations in Europe and Asia, aswell as in countries with far fewer resources. But many remained uncertain about how precisely best to contain it.
The brand new outbreaks were reported in places as far-flung as Italy and Iran, France and Algeria, and Spain’s Canary Islands. The tiny Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain said it had 17 cases, including a school bus driver who had transported students as recently as Sunday.
In Iran, the top of the country’s virus task force, who just a day earlier had urged the public never to overreact about the spread of the disease, tested positive himself. The official, Iraj Harirchi, posted a fresh video online, promising authorities would bring the virus under control within weeks.
But a ministry spokesman, Kianoush Jahanpour, said it could take at least before Persian New Year’s holiday on March 20, or given that late April, to support the disease. “We don’t expect a miracle for a while,” he said.
- Officials in South Korea said these were racing to contain an outbreak which has grown to nearly 1,000 cases.
“It’s a matter of speed and time: We should create a clear turning point within this week,” President Moon Jae-in said. In the greatest cluster, in metropolis of Daegu and close by towns, many shops remained closed Tuesday and activity in a few neighborhoods found a near standstill.
On a U.S. military base in Daegu, the guts of infections in South Korea, officials said a 61-year-old widow of a U.S. service member had been infected. It had been the first known case among persons related to the a large number of U.S. troops stationed in the united states.
- The virus’ toll continued to mount, even as Chinese officials reported a slowing in the amount of new cases. By Tuesday, the spread of the illness had sickened some 80,000 people worldwide and caused about 2,700 deaths.
Almost all those infections stay in China, where 518 new cases were reported Tuesday and another 71 deaths, 68 of these in the central city of Wuhan, where the epidemic was initially detected in December. The updates bring mainland China’s totals to 77,780 cases and 2,666 deaths, in line with the World Health Organization.
WHO said the fatality rate was between 2% and 4% in Wuhan and 0.7% elsewhere in China.
Dr. Bruce Aylward, the WHO envoy who led a team just back from China, told reporters Tuesday the reason for the large discrepancy was partly because the disease hit Wuhan early and fast, when “people didn’t know what we were dealing with, were learning how exactly to treat this.”
At the start of the outbreak, “people were finding severe disease, that’s why the alarm bell went off,” Aylward said. But now with more aggressive testing, mild cases are being diagnosed and isolated.
Source: the-japan-news.com
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