According to immunologist Dr. Pavel Grzesowski from the Medical Center for Postgraduate Education in Warsaw (Poland), in the next two to three weeks, infection with coronavirus can reach several hundred thousand people.
Confirmed cases of the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from China doubled overnight, and more than 4,500 people contracted the virus on Tuesday morning (January 28). The coronavirus has also killed at least 106 people, raising fears of a global epidemic.
Grzhesovsky noted that now it is no longer possible to accurately determine the number of infected:
'Current data suggests that the new coronavirus is less dangerous than SARS, in which case the death rate is around 10 percent of those infected. However, we don't know if the 2019-nCoV virus is stable or mutating. '
'The exact number of those infected is also unknown. More than 1,700 cases of infection have been officially registered until January 25. However, the actual number is certainly much higher because patients with milder conditions, when the infection resembles a cold, do not go to the doctor. Therefore, the scale of underestimation is, of course, enormous.
“Perhaps in two or three weeks we will be talking about several hundred thousand infections. This is a completely new virus, so no one is immune from it and it can spread despite the restrictions taken. '
Yesterday, WHO confirmed 2,798 cases of infection in 12 countries with a total of 5,794 suspected infections.
Outside the epicenter of infection in Wuhan, China, infections have been confirmed in the United States, Canada, Australia, Nepal, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, France, and Thailand.
Germany was the last country to confirm a coronavirus patient on Tuesday, bringing the total number of countries with characteristic patients to 13.
The virus is believed to have first manifested itself in a bustling livestock market in Wuhan, Hubei province.
According to Dr. Grzesowski, the new coronavirus is a zoonotic pathogen, and most likely the main version that it originated in bats and mutated in the body of snakes whose raw meat the Chinese ate is the most reliable.
