China is sitting on a powder keg - scientist
There is a high probability that an outbreak of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 will recur in China.
This was stated in an interview with Izvestia by the director of the Institute of Medical Parasitology, Tropical and Vector-Borne Diseases named after. E.I. Martsinovsky Sechenov University Alexander Lukashev, answering the question whether the Wuhan outbreak will repeat itself in China.
“There is a high probability that it will happen again. This is absolutely natural. The fact that China eliminated the virus so abruptly was a great success for epidemiologists, but it left the country on a powder keg. An immune layer has not formed there, so any introduction of the virus poses a very great threat to China and there is a possibility of an outbreak no weaker than the Wuhan one,” Lukashev said.
According to him, antibody tests are now being carried out in Moscow to determine the level of this threat.
“If we have formed an immune layer of 12%, this, of course, is not much. The immune layer protects from the recurrence of the epidemic by approximately 70%. But 12% can already significantly reduce the rate of spread of the virus. It also follows from these data that most people are completely asymptomatic and are not even included in the statistics. 12% - approximately 1,5 million. In Moscow, about 150 thousand of them were included in the statistics,” the scientist noted.
He points out that initially there were two extreme paths: the Chinese, when the country completely eliminated the incidence of disease through strict measures, and the Swedish, where they did nothing to create an immune layer.
“Both of these paths turned out to be suboptimal. China suffered huge economic losses and was left on a powder keg, and Sweden suffered a lot of deaths due to a complete lack of control over the epidemic. There is a middle way, when, on the one hand, they try to control the spread of the virus and prevent overload of medical systems, and on the other, they slowly build up an immune layer. How this happens in Russia,” Lukashev summed up.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.