NEW YORK - The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe, according to many of the world's leading infectious disease experts.
"It's very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic," said Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease."But will it be catastrophic? I don't know." The biggest uncertainty now, experts said, is how many people around the world will die. Sars killed about 10 per cent of those who got it, and Mers now kills about 1 of 3.
It is"increasingly unlikely that the virus can be contained," said Dr Thomas Frieden, a former director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention who now runs Resolve to Save Lives, a non-profit devoted to fighting epidemics. Closing borders to highly infectious pathogens never succeeds completely, experts said, because all frontiers are somewhat porous. Nonetheless, closings and rigorous screening may slow the spread, which will buy time for the development of drug treatments and vaccines.
Dr W. Ian Lipkin, a virus-hunter at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who is in China advising its Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said that although the virus is clearly being transmitted through casual contact, labs are still behind in processing samples. Anecdotal reports from China, and one published study from Germany, indicate that some people infected with the Wuhan coronavirus can pass it on before they show symptoms. That may make border-screening much harder, scientists said.
The virus' most vulnerable target is Africa, many experts said. More than 1 million expatriate Chinese work there, mostly on mining, drilling or engineering projects. Also, many Africans work and study in China and other countries where the virus has been found. At the moment, it seems unlikely that the virus will spread widely in countries with vigorous, alert public health systems, said Dr William Schaffner, a preventive medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre.
Four mild coronaviruses cause about a quarter of the nation's common colds, which also peak in winter.
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