Hundreds likely infected by Chinese virus – study
Credit to Author: Tempo Desk| Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2020 05:16:24 +0000
The number of people infected by a mystery SARS-like virus that has killed two people in China is likely hundreds more than officially reported, researchers have said.
The news comes as Chinese health authorities said Saturday that they have discovered 4 more cases of pneumonia following an outbreak of what is believed to be a new coronavirus strain.
The 4 individuals were diagnosed with pneumonia on Thursday and are in stable condition, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said in a statement published shortly after midnight. Saturday’s statement marked the first confirmation.
Chinese authorities have said pneumonia linked to the virus has hit at least 41 people in the country, with the outbreak centered around a seafood market in the central city of Wuhan.
But a paper published Friday by scientists with the MRC Center for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College in London said the number of those affected in the city was likely to be well over a thousand.
The scientists at the Center — which advises bodies including the World Health Organization — said they estimated a “total of 1,723 cases” in Wuhan would have been infected as of January 12.
The researchers took the number of cases reported outside China so far — two in Thailand and one in Japan — to infer how many were likely infected in the city, based on international flight traffic data from Wuhan’s airport.
“For Wuhan to have exported three cases to other countries would imply there would have to be many more cases than have been reported,” Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the authors of the report, told the BBC.
“I am substantially more concerned than I was a week ago,” adding, however, that it was “too early to be alarmist.”
“People should be considering the possibility of substantial human-to-human transmission more seriously than they have so far,” he added, saying it was “unlikely” that animal exposure was the main source of infection.
Two people are known to have been killed by the virus, a pathogen from the same family as the deadly SARS virus 
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