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New China virus ‘not as powerful as SARS’: health official
BEIJING, Jan 26, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – A top Chinese health official said
Sunday that a new deadly virus that has infected nearly 2,000 people and
killed dozens in China is “not as powerful as SARS”.
The new virus has sparked alarm amid a rising death toll and the discovery
that it comes from the same family of coronaviruses as SARS, which killed
nearly 650 people across mainland China and Hong Kong.
But Chinese officials told reporters that the new disease was less powerful
than SARS — though it was becoming more contagious.
“From what we see now, this disease is indeed…not as powerful as SARS,”
said Gao Fu, head of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, at a
press briefing in Beijing.
However, it also appears that the “spreading ability of the virus is
getting stronger,” added Ma Xiaowei, head of China’s National Health
Commission (NHC).
The new disease also has an incubation period of up to two weeks, Ma said
at the press conference, and that it was “contagious during the incubation
period.”
“This is very different from SARS,” he added.
The new virus was first reported in the central Chinese city of Wuhan last
month, but has since spread to at least 30 regions in China, resulting in
restrictions on public transport and even tour groups as Chinese authorities
scramble to contain the disease.
Four cities — including Beijing and Shanghai, and the eastern province of
Shandong — announced bans on long-distance buses from entering or leaving
their borders, a move that will affect millions of people travelling over the
Lunar New Year holiday.
And on Thursday, the Chinese government put the hard-hit province of Hubei
under effective quarantine in an unprecedented operation affecting tens of
millions of people to slow the spread of an illness that President Xi Jinping
said posed a “grave” threat.
At Sunday’s press briefing, Chinese health officials said the Lunar New
Year holiday was the “best window” of time to contain the epidemic. If the
transport restrictions are successfully implemented, they could “buy time”
for the next phase of prevention and control, said Li Bin, deputy minister at
the NHC.
“We’re still not clear on the potential changes of the epidemic,” he
admitted.
“The situation of how the epidemic develops is still not entirely in our
control.”
BSS/AFP/SSS/1842 hrs