If countries can slow the virus down enough to get through flu season, it will provide 'massive positive benefits,' the WHO said.
The WHO said that if countries can throw a collective cog in the coronavirus wheel, it can help delay burdens placed on health care systems currently spread thin by flu season.
“Even slowing down the virus by a month or six weeks has massive positive benefits on the system,” Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Program, said during the press briefing Monday.A WHO-led group of scientists has wrapped up a trip to the center of the outbreak — Wuhan, China — and is scheduled to offer a full report Tuesday.
But Tedros provided a few early details. Inside of Wuhan, the fatality rate is between 2 percent and 4 percent. But elsewhere so far, it’s much lower, at 0.7 percent.. Those patients generally feel better within about two weeks, Tedros said. But more severe cases can take up to six weeks for recovery. The elderly and people with compromised immune systems have been most vulnerable to serious health effects.
One other finding: the epidemic in China appears to have peaked sometime between Jan. 23 and Feb. 2, before declining steadily. More than 77,000 people in China have fallen ill with COVID-19, the illness that's caused by the coronavirus. And more than 2,600 people have died there.
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