Fears of major outbreak amid busy travel period
The spread of the outbreak comes as the country gets ready for the Lunar New Year holiday later this week. On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that there was evidence of "limited human-to-human transmission" of the new virus raising fears of a wider regional outbreak. The holiday period typically sees hundreds of millions of Chinese travel throughout the country and overseas. The three cases outside China have all been linked to Wuhan. On Monday, South Korea also confirmed its first case of the virus. According to the South Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a 35-year-old Chinese woman was detected by temperature screening upon arriving Sunday at Seoul's Incheon International Airport from Wuhan. She has been quarantined and is in a stable condition, the CDC said. The woman, a Wuhan resident, had planned to go on holiday in South Korea and Japan with five others. She said she developed a fever and muscle pains on Saturday and was prescribed cold medicine by a doctor in Wuhan, according to the CDC. Almost 7 million Chinese were estimated to have traveled overseas last year during the Lunar New Year holiday season. "I believe Chinese tourists will bring the virus to many other countries in Asia in the coming days, due to their overseas travels during the Lunar New Year holiday," Professor David Hui Shu-cheong, a respiratory expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told CNN Monday.Study suggests infections may be underestimated
The pneumonia outbreak emerged last month in Wuhan, the largest city in central China and a major transportation hub. Officials in China have linked the viral infections to a Wuhan seafood and wildlife market, which has been closed since January 1 to prevent further spread of the illness. Chinese scientists on January 8 identified the pathogen as a new strain of coronavirus, in the same family of the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). While the new virus has not shown death rates like SARS, a new study by Imperial College London suggests the number of infections in Wuhan is likely to have been grossly underestimated. "The detection of three cases outside China is worrying. We calculate, based on flight and population data, that there is only a 1 in 574 chance that a person infected in Wuhan would travel overseas before they sought medical care. This implies there might have been over 1,700 cases in Wuhan so far," Imperial College London's Neil Ferguson, a disease outbreak scientist, told CNN. On Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced three US airports -- in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles -- will start screening passengers arriving from Wuhan to check for signs of the new virus, following similar measures taken by governments in Asia.DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
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