A cured COVID-19 patient talks with a medical worker at the "Wuhan Livingroom" makeshift hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 15, 2020. The first batch of 17 cured COVID-19 patients are discharged from the "Wuhan Livingroom" makeshift hospital on Saturday. Photo: Xinhua

A media report which said up to "two-thirds" of the global population could get infected by the coronavirus, or COVID-19, is unsubstantiated and unacademic despite being eye-catching, infectious-disease scientists told the Global Times on Monday.

Yang Gonghuan, former vice director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), told the Global Times on Monday that "since the estimations are not from academic papers, I don't know what exactly the data model that the experts used to come out with such a conclusion, but if it is just a rough estimation with just a few words that they told the media in an interview, I don't think we need to treat it too seriously." 

The COVID-19 is not only hurting people's health but could also stoke fear and panic among the public, so any prediction or estimation should be made cautiously and based on thorough research, Yang said. 

"Currently, data has shown the number of newly infected cases is dropping for 13 consecutive days outside Central China's Hubei Province, so this is a hard fact that can prove the measures that the Chinese government conducted to prevent and control the epidemic are effective," she noted. 

Ira Longini, an adviser to the World Health Organization who tracked studies of the virus' transmissibility in China, said to Bloomberg last week that "his estimate implies that there could eventually be billions more infections than the current official tally of about 60,000."

Gabriel Leung, a public health professor at the University of Hong Kong, has also said to Bloomberg that "close to two-thirds of the world could potentially catch the virus if it is left unchecked."

The estimation of two-thirds of the global population potentially being infected was sort of overreaction, but the risk that the epidemic may spread globally still needs to be treated with a high degree of caution, said Chinese observers. 

China's measures to prevent and control the virus have seen positive effects, but to what extent the rest of the world can prevent the outbreak depends on other governments' attitudes and capabilities to deal with such a global challenge, observers noted.

Jennifer Huang Bouey, an epidemiologist and senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation has suggested Singapore could be a key indicator to observe whether a large-scale COVID-19 outbreak could occur outside China. 

And according to her, the risk is at least "moderate."

Bouey told the Global Times that with the disease spreading to Singapore, it will be important to observe how the virus responds to a high-temperature environment.

Singapore's health and medical system uses detailed trajectory to track each infected person. If the outbreak continues, other countries and regions will face growing risks in community outbreaks, she said.


Newspaper headline: Billions more getting infected debunked