Outside China, coronavirus transmission ‘iceberg’ may not be as big as feared

As infections from COVID-19 coronavirus continue to rise, a senior UN health expert said that there were some indications that disease transmission outside China might not be the tip of the “iceberg” that had been feared.

“We’re not seeing a dramatic increase in transmission outside China,” Dr. Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme chief, said while urging against making hasty assessments.

Of the 1,369 deaths from the coronavirus to date, all but two have been in China. In Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak, 13,332 cases have been clinically confirmed.

Outside China, there have been 447 cases from 24 other countries and two deaths; one in the Philippines and another in Japan.

The biggest cluster outside China is on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which is in quarantine in Yokohama port, Japan. To date, 218 passengers on board have tested positive for COVID-19.

Speaking to journalists, Dr. Ryan explained that routine winter testing of patients with chest ailments in hospitals in China, Singapore and Hong Kong had not indicated widespread COVID-19 transmission.

“In emergency rooms and as part of normal winter respiratory disease surveillance, they’ve been actively testing thousands of samples that are not suspect cases of COVID,” he said.

Nonetheless, fears that only a fraction of cases were being detected were “as valid as speculations in the other direction”, Dr. Ryan insisted, before adding that no specific treatments existed for patients, beyond “standard antivirals” used for previous coronavirus outbreaks, such as during the SARS epidemic in 2003.

Vaccines and new drugs would take a long time and require a huge investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, Dr. Ryan explained, before urging public and private investment to spread the risk.

Dr. Ryan said that the latest data showing a jump in infections reflects a change in how cases are being diagnosed and reported by Chinese authorities.

From now on in Hubei province only, trained medical professionals are authorized to classify a suspected case of COVID-19 as a clinically diagnosed case based on chest imaging, rather than having to have a laboratory confirmation, the WHO official said.

Original source: UN News
Published on 13 February 2020