WHO raises threat assessment, epidemic to last several months

No, the global threat from Chinese coronavirus is not “moderate” but “high”. WHO raised its level after mistakenly calling it “moderate.” “It was a wording error, and we corrected it,” an organization spokesperson told AFP. The correction, however, does not change the fact that the WHO does not consider the epidemic to be a “public health emergency of international concern”, she said. At the same time, epidemiology experts have announced that, according to the first available data, the epidemic should last several months and cause tens of thousands of patients.

Before rectifying its error, WHO had written in its situation reports that the risk was “very high in China, high at the regional level and moderate at the international level. That absolutely does not mean that we have changed our risk assessment, but this error has crept in, “said the spokesperson.

To date, WHO has used the term “public health emergency of international concern” only in rare cases of epidemics requiring a vigorous global response, such as the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, where Then she thought she was too alarmist. In 2014, it also used this designation to refer to Ebola, which ravaged part of West Africa. On the contrary, he was accused of having taken too long to measure the scale of the crisis. In, 2016 when Zika was traveling at high speed in South America, WHO also called it a “public health emergency of international concern”.

“It will not stop next month,” say the experts.

If the WHO refuses to use this term to describe the epidemic of Chinese coronavirus, which scientists have named virus 2019-nCoV, the latter are by no means reassuring on the subject. “It’s not going to stop next week or next month,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a professor at the Northeastern University of the United States, who is coordinating a group of researchers publishing real-time analyzes of the epidemic.

“The best scenario would be for it to continue in the spring, for the summer, and then fall off,” said David Fisman, professor at the University of Toronto (Canada), and author of a newsletter for the Society. International Center for Infectious Diseases, AFP.

In recent days, many specialists have calculated the basic reproduction rate, or R Zero, which represents the number of people infected by an infected person. Their estimates range from 1.4 to 3.8, which is moderate, but that figure is only an average. Some patients may have infected many people, while others may not.

As a reminder, this rate is 1.3 for seasonal flu and 2 to 5 for SARS which killed 774 people in Southeast Asia 2002/2003. For measles, it is 12 to 18. With routine isolation and hand washing, the number of people infected could decrease. When it falls below 1, the epidemic will end, experts say.

A mortality rate around 3%

“The SARS was controllable, so we hope that it will be too, but we will only know it in a few weeks (…) It will take weeks, probably months, and nobody knows how it will evolve”, details David Fisman . It will therefore probably take a week or two before the measures taken by China in recent days are felt.

Another important question concerns the contagion period of 2019-nCoV. If, until this weekend, it was thought that the sick became contagious only after the onset of symptoms, the Chinese authorities now assure the contrary. WHO has not yet decided on the issue. The incubation period is estimated to be around two weeks.

Currently, China has confirmed just over 4,000 sick and 100 dead on its territory. Abroad, around 50 cases have so far been detected. However, experts fear that, as in the time of SARS, Beijing is hiding the scale of the epidemic. Especially since many cases have yet to be detected. According to the group coordinated at Northeastern, the real number of Chinese cases is undoubtedly more than 25,000. At the University of Hong Kong, researchers estimate the number of cases at more than 40,000.

As for the number of possible deaths, it is difficult to estimate. So far, the death rate is around 3%, but it tends to go up when the most vulnerable patients die and then go down to go up again. We will therefore have to wait a few weeks before the true extent of the danger of the coronavirus is publicly revealed.

–