Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

China Dispatches Thousands of Medics  to Epicenter of Coronavirus


Wed 12 Feb 2020 | 08:55 AM
Ahmed Moamar

The Central government of China has decided to dispatch more than 20 thousand medics to Hubei province, the epicenter of the Coronavirus, to fight the deadly virus there.

The city of Wuhan, the urban center of that province, has registered the highest rate of infection since late December 2019.

On the other hand, the Chinese authorities revealed that fatalities of the virus exceeded the threshold of one thousand so far along with 426 thousand injuries.

The data collected by scientists at UK Southampton University estimates the virus's spread for the next three months.

It's based on the mobile phone and flight data of 60,000 of five million residents who fled Wuhan - where Coronavirus originated - before the region was properly locked down.

The research group used tech data to predict the spread, with shocking results.

Thousands of air passengers whose data was mapped traveled to 382 cities outside of mainland China in the days leading up to January 23 - Wuhan's lockdown date.

And the team warns: "The majority of these cities were in Asia, but major hubs in Europe, the US and Australia were also prominent, with strong correlation seen between predicted importation risks and reported cases seen".

Researchers urge screening at origin high-risk cities across the globe before April - and that's simply to limit the spread beyond its current extent.

During China's Lunar New Year, scores of potentially infected Chinese residents from high-risk cities traveled to Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Australia.

The study's authors concluded: "Further spread of 2019-nCoV within China and international exportation is likely to occur,” the authors concluded".

They warned all cities should be prepared to contain the spread of the deadly virus.

Jin Dong-Yan, a molecular virologist at Hong Kong University’s School of Biomedical Sciences morosely concluded: "It’s definitely too late...Five million out. That’s a big challenge. Many of them may not come back to Wuhan but hang around somewhere else".