The news is grim — and keeps getting grimmer.
Jonathan Read, a British expert on the transmission and evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases, predicts that hundreds of thousands of people will soon be infected with the coronvirus sweeping across China and moving already to other countries around the world.
“In 14 days’ time (4 February 2020), our model predicts the number of infected people in Wuhan to be greater than 190 thousand (prediction interval, 132,751 to 273,649),” Read and other researchers wrote in a new paper titled “Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV: early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions.”
“We predict the cities with the largest outbreaks elsewhere in China to be Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Chengdu. We also predict that by 4 Feb 2020, the countries or special administrative regions at greatest risk of importing infections through air travel are Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea,” the researchers wrote. – READ MORE