Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

 IMF Warns of Two Crucial Weeks Awaiting China, World


Sat 15 Feb 2020 | 12:51 PM
Ahmed Moamar

The Director-General of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, confirmed that the next two weeks will be decisive in determining the economic impact of the spreading Coronavirus in China and the world.

She told CNBC News Network on the sidelines of the Munich Security Forum that during the standing period, the Chinese authorities may decide to reopen factories across the country.

She considers that such a step would give a better impression of China's resilience.

This step will give a positive impression  to the rest of the world."

Georgieva added that the IMF is monitoring how the new virus of Corona is spreading outside China.

Experts hope that the virus is not a big problem at the moment, but this hope would be changed to a nightmare later.

The deadly virus may transmit the disease to countries with weak health systems, such as in  Africa, for example.

The influenza-like virus has killed about 1,500 people, most of them in China.

Only three persons in other countries were killed.

The infected cases leaped to nearly 64,000 almost most of them in China as well.

Georgieva warns that any comparison between Coronavirus and the other virus that caused the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic between that took place in China  2002-2003, will be not accurate at all.

She explained that the new strain of the virus differs deeply from SARS.

Within two decades approximately the global economy has changed.

In the course of the first years of the 21st century, China participated by only 8% in the world economy.

But now the Chinese economy represents about 19% of the international manufacture.

She warns that the world economy slows after six weeks of breaking the Coronavirus in Hubei province in the middle section of China.

When China reported a drop in the number of new cases of the deadly coronavirus earlier this week, hopes were raised that the outbreak might be slowing down.

But on Thursday, health authorities in Hubei, the province at the center of the epidemic, announced there had been nearly 15,000 new cases overnight -- almost 10 times the number of cases announced the previous day.

The government was quick to point out the outbreak didn't suddenly get much worse; the authorities had simply changed the way they reported cases in order to allow more people to access treatment faster.

"Our forecast was 1,500 new cases, and I opened my computer and it's 15,000 new cases. I think my hair stood up on my head," said David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto, who has spent a lot of time modeling the current coronavirus epidemic.

The shift in how new cases are diagnosed has compounded questions about whether the world can rely on the numbers coming out of China, amid criticism over the government's handling of the outbreak.